Coerce-tomer Service
Definition: The act of unduly pressuring a potential customer to do business with you or to retain their business
Your sales technique is too aggressive. Stop before you scare off potential customers!
Even inexperienced marketers know that customers will only take time to research and buy products or services that are easy to use and suit their needs. With this in mind, sometimes all you need is a little gentle persuasion along with an awesome sales pitch (and an excellent product to back it up) to get a product sold and into the hands or home of the consumer.
Some companies aren’t so gentle when marketing their products, however. When their method of persuasion becomes aggressive, it becomes coercion. The most recent act of coerce-tomer service is courtesy of a customer service representative at Comcast. A customer called in to cancel his cable and internet services and the representative, unaware he was being taped, gave him a hard time and demanded to know why he was cancelling! At one point, he even refused to cancel the service, leading the customer into a never-ending series of questions while somehow managing to boast about the excellent services Comcast provides. The recording of the 20 minute exchange with Comcast was posted online by customer Ryan Block and has had over 3 million hits! Comcast has since apologized for their representative but the damage has been done! That is definitely a customer they will never get back and it has left a bad taste in the mouths of the public as well.
No one likes to be pressured or bullied into buying something they don’t want and when you have to coerce customers into buying your products or services, you might as well just kiss them goodbye!
