Another example of bad marketing/selling

19/09/2007

Today a woman called from Fortum to sell me electricity at a fixed cost. I was quite busy at 3pm so I asked her if she could send me some more info on this by mail or e-mail so I could have a look at it when I have more time. I’m the kind of person that wants to take the time to make proper calculations even if it is about saving 5 to 10 euros a year (I’m sure this sort of thinking will payoff later on).

She began hesitating after I presented the question to think about this. “Well, you know you only have one day since the system forwards these tomorrow and the campaign ends”, was one reason she stated. Fair enough, but don’t blame it on the system – they’re built by us! She promised to send me an e-mail so I could go over this, even if I only had tonight to think about it. I asked her if I could ring her back about this when I had the time to do so, she replied no as the e-mail is a bulk e-mail that has no personal contact details and instead, she’d ring me back tomorrow to ask how I had decided. I can tell you now (without a lot of thinking) that I won’t change to Fortum’s fixed electricity (no matter how cheap it is to competitors), because the promised e-mail never reached me. If they can’t deliver me an e-mail, how are they going to deliver me electricity?

Question is – what went wrong and what could have been done better?

  • First of all, understand the customer behaviour – how many consumers make these sort of decisions on the phone? It’s a different thing trying to get you to change mobile operators or order a magazine than change your electricity supplier.
  • How did the seller support my hesitation? She promised to send me an e-mail, that never reached me. She denied me to personally calling her in case I would have more questions. Two show stoppers to actually selling me anything.
  • If I wanted to make the decision to switch my electricity provider – how would I go about without having to contact her (or in this case hope that she would contact me) to go through with the order? No way what so ever.
  • With a little optimisation, she could have been doing double cold calling if people could follow up on this online – instead of having to ring people back on their decisions.

Numerous obstacles in a simple selling process that prevented me from making my decision, following up on the sale/offer and actually putting through the change in electricity providers (ie. purchase). I’m sure there are better ways to go about this – for example, the internet wasn’t even touched in this. She could have given me a simple code that I could enter on their website to get more info on this (and at the same time feel I am priviliged as the information is not for everyone – giving some value to her interrupting my work day) and thus give me the possibility to go through with the order.

Another good example of a lost sale purely because of bad marketing (and the absence of internet).

There are 2 comments in this article:

  1. 21/09/2007Masa say:

    Ah, how entertaining to read this, because I got the same
    “joy” of being spammed by Fortum’s phone calls.
    In a nut shell:
    - I was in a work weeting for ~2hours, when I noticed
    that my cell phone had registered 3 missed phone calls,
    all from a local Helsinki area, but from a caller that
    I didn’t know.
    - Then the phone started blinking again, the same number!
    - I excused my collagues and said “I’m sorry I have to
    leave this meeting for a moment, this *must be urgent*.
    - And there it was, this lady from Fortum explaining how
    they could change my electricity bills. She asked a
    lot, like detailed tariff information etc., which I
    couldn’t answer, so I asked her to send me an e-mail.
    - “no, we do only phone campaign”. I replied that I can’t
    decide on the phone, because I have to check my bill
    and look which one is cheaper. She promised to call me
    back in a week.
    - An hour goes by, and this number calls me again.
    - “hello, have you checked your tariffs?”. NO! I’m still
    at work, call me in a week I said.
    - I checked the bills and called back to the number.
    An operator voice said “this number is not valid”.
    What the f***?!
    - Then it comes, the long awaited phone call. I was pissed
    because they didn’t receive calls and said “we only
    call *you*, you can’t call us. And we don’t use e-mail,
    this is a phone campaign.”
    - So there it was, my chance to save some money (perhaps)
    in household bills, but I rejected it. Why? Because I
    hated the way they marketed it.

    (at last I got a chance to let some pressure go down on
    this issue :) )

  2. 23/09/2007Antti say:

    This is getting interesting as they told me that they have this e-mail that they send out. Oh well, there’s definitely something Fortum can learn about this.

    How successful was their campaign? They should do a simple Google search for it and decide afterwards :)

Write a comment: