As some of you may know, I've recently resumed full-time work for the retail arm of a major Australian mobile phone company.
Clue: it's red and it's not Virgin.
I'd like to explain a few inaliable truths about the mobile phone industry that I feel you should all probably know.
From the moment you walk in the front of the store, the 11-point sales process begins. The customer becomes a participant and subject of a psychological examination, a process of insideous manipulation. Under the pretense of providing "a better customer service experience", the salesperson is trained at regular intervals in intensive sales seminars, called "Super Sales' and 'Super Sales Pro'.
The subject matter of such seminars is the role-play of situations in which a customer may decide against purchasing. "Handling the Objection" is a prominant topic, providing for an entire chapter of the training modules.
As a customer, you may not realise that the moment you enter the door, you are under scrutiny. You are being analysed and catagorised by the sales staff to determine whether you are worth $2 commission on a non-contract sale, of whether you have the potential for a 2 year, locked-in contract connection. If you have a credit-rating and some ID, you become $40 to the sales representative. You are thus the target of manipulation.
Buy it now. Spend twice what you were anticipating. Walk out of the store thinking you got a good deal. Tell your friends to see the honest guys at the ******** store. Go back to store in 8 months when phone breaks down. Be convinced to pay out your contract for $550 so you can get another contract on a new phone with a 640 megapixel camera and can navigate a US Submarine from the other side of the planet. Go for the features that are so subtly suggested.
It's called a F.A.B.S.
F - Feature - "Name the feature to the customer"
A - Advantage - "Explain the advantage of having the feature in the context of the customer"
B. - Benefit - "Demonstrate a situation in which this would benefit the particular customer"
S - Seller - "Ask a question that requires that the customer agrees with the brilliance of the feature, yet is obviously self-evident".
"This phone has got a built-in loud-speaker... It allows you to have a conversation without the phone against your ear... When your kids call you at work, you can carry on working, whilst talking 'hands-free' to your children."
Little weaknesses. Small imperfections in the human psyche that leave the door open to manipulation. Retail has become but a career in exploiting those weaknesses that make us spend the dollar that we should have saved, buy the phone we never needed, or subscribe to services we'll never use more than once.
Be conscious of this the next time you enter a mobile phone store. Do some research beforehand and know what you want before ever entering the phone store. For a couple of hours on the internet beforehand, you can save yourself over a thousand dollars a year. Read blogs, review sites, discussion boards etc. to understand the pitfalls of each model, each phone company, and each contract/plan.
The sales person, in some way or another, sees you as commission. He may inadvertantly provide good customer service in his quest for securing the sale. However, you are a dollar or an hour. You are $40 or 5 minutes. You are a target or a "TW" (time-waster).
I'll happily translate sales jargon into English if you're having trouble deciphering mobile-phone fantasy from over-priced reality.
