2012 | Finch Sells

Marketing Tips From An Indian Call Centre

Feb 01 2012

I’ve just reached the end of my existing phone contract. Despite bitching and grumbling about Three, my ‘service provider’, for as long as I can remember; I decided to shoot myself in the balls yet again by renewing with them. I don’t like the idea of losing my current phone number, even if it means dealing with half a signal bar in my own house.

The Samsung Galaxy S2 looked sufficiently tasty to merit a goodbye to my HTC, so I got the ball rolling. I hit 333 on my keypad and waited to be put through to somebody who could help me.

Calling a sales representative at Three is like challenging Derren Brown to a game of misdirection. There’s something deliberately perplexing about the South Indian dialect, and the guy on the end of the phone can call himself ‘Graham’ until he’s blue in the face; I’m still not buying it.

I believe I made the critical error of calling Three with the stated intention of upgrading. Had I waited for them to call me, I could have easily fudged their sales funnel with my threats to move network. Guys, if you ever want more from your phone contract, press x to speak to somebody about canceling your existing deal. It works every time.

To my surprise, it took all of about 37 seconds for the bloodsuckers to translate my keyword ‘new contract’ in to an apparent desire to be upsold the moon. I found myself being shoved towards ‘Steve’ on the sales team.

We went through the usual security verification, littered with bullshit idle small talk. Apparently there is a command in the Three support system that encourages employees to wish happy birthday to anybody whose birth date falls in a 4 day range. I found myself describing my celebrations three times in a row.

“Oh, I see that it was your birthday four days ago, Mr. Osborn. May I ask how you spent it?”

“Well actually, ‘Steve’, I spent it in the darkest corner of my basement. I’m still there now. I’ve been waiting for this call, ‘Steve’. I’ve been chanting my security answers in a tribal beat. Oh yes, I’ve been praying for this conversation, ‘Steve’. Now why don’t you tell me a little more about that Samsung?”

“…uh, excellent, now, Mr. Osborn…” By this point, his cordial laugh has degenerated in to a nervous hush. All thoughts of a commission have been banished in the name of a psycho on Line 107.

You see, the only way to play Three effectively is to beat them at their own game. And their game is essentially ‘the mindfuck’. It’s a tour de force in disorientation, rapid-fire T&Cs and blatant trickery.

It wasn’t long before I was being offered my sparkling new contract.

“Yes, Mr. Osborn, I can certainly help you today. Now, you say that you are interested in the Samsung Galaxy S2. Well, I am going to give you a special deal on that phone, your preferred handset. I’m going to give you unlimited Internet usage, 8000 texts, 8000 minutes for a monthly charge of just £40. Would you say that that is a good deal, Mr. Osborn?”

“Sounds pretty good to me.”

“Excellent, fantastic. Well, that’s great. Now as a loyal customer to Three, I’d also like to tell you about a special ‘benefit’ that I’d love to offer to you exclusively. I think you’re going to really love it. Would you like to hear about that, Mr. Osborn?”

Marketing note: Clearly the salesmen at Three have the classic ‘benefits over features’ argument drummed in to their heads. They crowbar the words ‘special benefit’ in to their pitch like relentless drones. Also, they’re skilled at using one of my favourite sales techniques: they build up momentum by feeding a barrage of questions where the only answer is ‘yes’. Get a prospect to say ‘yes’ to a bunch of smaller questions and his answer to the big one is likely to be influenced.

By this point, I knew damn well where the conversation was heading. I’ve been cold-called several times by Three in the last few months. They seem absolutely determined to sell me a second handset, or to draw family referrals like blood from a stone.

Sure enough, ‘Steve’ pitched me with a second handset. 300 minutes, 200 texts and 500mb of Internet allowance. But best of all, I could have this handset absolutely free. Now here’s where their shenanigans get somewhat murky.

I asked twice, specifically, if the handset was available for £0 and no monthly charges. Both times, ‘Steve’ confirmed that it was.

Reluctantly, but sensing something was amiss, I agree to be sent the second handset. I figured I’d flog it on eBay, or give it to one of my many friends with cracked iPhone screens. I do love a gesture of irony.

Delighted with his coup, ‘Steve’ then hit me with the small print. The sales process is designed to extract audible sighs while you agree and confirm a merciless list of T&Cs. Eventually we neared the end, and I was hit with this…

“So, Mr. Osborn, today you have agreed to not one but two handsets. Firstly, the Samsung Galaxy S2 for £40/month, your desired handset, and secondly a Samsung Europa Whatever, absolutely free as a special benefit for being a loyal customer to Three…”

“…Now I have to tell you, Mr. Osborn, and it’s just a minor detail, but we can’t process the second phone in our system on a free contract. So what I’m going to do is set up two direct debits. The first will charge you £30 for the Galaxy S2, and the second will charge you £10 for the Europa Whatever, which of course, you are receiving free of charge as a special benefit for being a loyal customer. So, all in all, you will be paying £40/month for the Samsung Galaxy S2 and getting a second handset absolutely free of charge. Can I go through and confirm this on the system, Mr. Osborn?”

Hold on, what the hell?

Suddenly it hit me that from the moment ‘Steve’ offered me a £40/month contract, I’d been setup for one of the most long-winded upsell tricks in the book. I directed my browser at the Three website and sure enough, there was the Samsung Galaxy S2 on sale for £35/month. Forget the loyal customer bullshit. He’d actually given me a small discount on my intended phone, which I’m probably entitled to after seven years with the company. And his ‘special benefit’? It was no more than a second contract, lumbering me with a phone that I initially rejected.

Marketing note: Upselling can be effective, but even more effective is getting your prospect to agree to an inflated price and then bundling in the upsell. Customers are notoriously bad at valuing products. They rely on contrast and comparison to decipher the good deals from the bad. As soon as I signaled that I was happy with a £40/month price point, I took on the identity of lamb to the slaughter, so easy would it be to get me to approve of the same contract I’ve been declining for the last 6 months…

I tip my hat to Three, because by this point, I truly couldn’t have given a shit. I’d been on the phone for close to 30 minutes.

In the UK, we have a customer protection scheme for online and phone-based sales. It’s a statutory cooling off period, where contracts can be cancelled in the first few days (Incidentally, the same law does not apply in-store so always get your contracted shit online, guys.). I decided to wait for the phones to be delivered and then send back the second unwanted handset. By canceling, I would get the Samsung Galaxy for £30/month – finally, a good deal that looks, smells and tastes like a good deal!

So, I waited for the delivery and then called Three again… pressed 4 to speak to a cancellation assistant, pressed 6 to confirm that I was serious, pressed 9 to answer some algebra, before finally muttering the ‘secret word’ to reach the help desk: “ARRRGHHHH!”

It’s no surprise that from the moment I mentioned ‘cancel contract’, I found myself plunged in to a labyrinth of darkness, holding queues and the motherfucking Black Eyed Peas. If you think upgrading your contract is a pain in the arse, just try canceling one. Invariably you’ll find that the most persistent, crafty bastards are placed on these desks. Their mission is to make you think twice.

Before long, you’re pleading to speak to ‘Steve’ again. Except this world resembles the Orwellian dystopia, where ‘Steve’ is now known as ‘Abraham’, and your sanity is questioned for stating otherwise.

Note to service providers: If you’re a large company like Three, you can generally get away with making the cancellation procedure a thousand times more agonizing than the sales funnel. If you’re a small business, this is reputation suicide. In fact, I would even suggest that dealing with the customers looking to cancel is more important than wooing new prospects. Prospects are still prospects, they’ll come and go. But your customers possess the ammunition to leave your reputation in the gutter. Make life easy for them – even when their intention is to ditch you.

If you’re still following by now, you’re probably wondering: did I manage to cancel the contract? or did I succumb to the web of lies and tricky? Well, I’m about to find out.

After negotiating the Black Eyed Peas, a sore arse, and close to an hour being bounced around on hold, I finally reached the contract cancellation help desk. What did I discover? My contracts weren’t even active in the system yet! And, of course, the Three system is designed in such a way that inactive accounts cannot be terminated. I was told to call back today, which I’m about to do.

A final marketing note: If the customer is aware of his cooling off period, insist that he observes another cooling off period before he can make his final decision. If you’re that customer? Congratulations. The ‘cooling off period within a cooling off period’ is the very last hurdle guarding the light at the end of the tunnel. You’re almost home and dry!

Recommended This Week

Make sure you grab a copy of Premium Posts Volume 3. Featuring over 75 pages of tips and techniques to help you dominate the dating niche, Volume 3 should give your campaigns a nice boost for 2012. Download a copy here.
I’ve recently re-branded FinchBlogs.com to cover a more personal flavour of the crap I’m currently working on. I’ll be blogging about issues even more obscure than sleazeball marketing, so check it out if you dare.
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POF 7-Day Mastery Guide Review

Jan 30 2012

Last week, iPyxel’s Tom Fang kindly dropped his POF 7-Day Mastery Guide in to my inbox. Being a regular advertiser on Plentyoffish, I busted out my sponge, and set about soaking up his advice in the hope that it’d be somewhat different to my usual tricks and shenanigans, a few of which I framed for mass consumption in Premium Posts Volume 1.

Well, it was certainly different. Not a reference to my balls in sight.

Here’s iPyxel’s breakdown of the content included.

Mass production of ads
Approaching broad vs. niche traffic
Tracking methodology and managing campaigns en mass
How to target and split test properly
Building long term campaigns by mitigating burnout
Detailed explanations of POF nuances

The POF 7-Day Mastery Guide takes a step away from addressing specific campaign ideas. You won’t find case studies or ready-made banners to be stolen. Tom makes it perfectly clear that the creative process is not his bread and butter. He even surrenders that many buyers of his guide will be able to use it to make more money than he does.

That’s a tour de force in self-deprecation, although probably a confession he’ll want to disown if the Warrior Forum pounces on the product.

What the 7-Day Mastery Guide really homes in on is the development of systems, algorithms and cold-blooded ruthlessness in the way that you create, manage and cull your campaigns.

Unlike Tom, I am not a number’s man. I find it difficult to launch dozens of tightly targeted, flawlessly labelled campaigns, while tracking the entire process through Excel and running figures of ‘continue/pause’ in my brain. But that’s not to say that I shouldn’t make the effort to embrace his approach.

If Premium Posts Volume 1 sought to gun down some of the psychology that lurks behind a successful ad, the POF 7-Day Mastery Guide is a structured and highly organized manifesto for getting profitable as soon as possible, while losing the least amount of cash.

Throughout the guide, Tom keeps his core principles of sustainability and scalability close to every tidbit that he gives away. I think many POF advertisers are guilty of sacrificing these qualities in the frantic search for profitability, so it’s definitely a mindset that should be taken onboard.

The information is broken in to 7 sections, with one for each day of the week. Knowing how proactive most affiliates can be, I’d have been tempted to lower my expectations and call it a 7-Month guide, but alas.

Here they are:

Day 1: Tom’s core principles, budget setting, loss limiting, basic targeting.
Day 2: Getting to know competition, finding images, writing copy.
Day 3: Ad creation, Photoshop batch processing, and split-testing mechanics.
Day 4: Effective tracking, organizing your campaigns, avoiding burnout.
Day 5: How to bid effectively, the concept of hurdling, session depth myths.
Day 6: Direct linking vs LPs, maintaining campaigns, scaling effectively.
Day 7: Preparing for offers to blow up, advance testing, and outsourcing.

The systems Tom endorses will almost certainly require a grand rethink in how you organize your campaigns. For example, after logging in to your account, what would you think if your campaigns were suddenly titled like this:

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I’d probably assume that I was having a stroke. But this is actually a hallmark of Tom’s immensely structured approach to his advertising. Campaign titles are decoded in to stone-dead giveaways of the targeting that lays inside, assuming you haven’t lost the wall chart. And as for the targeting? I found Tom’s insight in to compartmentalizing campaigns to be some of the best in the guide.

He explains the importance of session depth, frequency and login counts with great detail, refusing to settle for that annoying nugget of faux wisdom “users with login counts below 100 are golden, only target them“, as so many fall in to the trap of believing. There are some great tips for sustaining campaigns over long periods of time.

Tom once again resorts to mathematics to explain why campaigns adjusted to higher login counts need to be different from those going after the ‘new fish’. This is where his methodology for creating systems really shines through. Whilst most of us are busy judging POF users as either in or out of a target group, Tom stalks the users from cog to cog in his system. The guide shows, very effectively, how to maximize your chances of a conversion via layered targeting.

For experienced POF marketers, particularly those like myself who operate by instinctive catapultations of shite at the wall, Tom’s adherence to structure will get you thinking about how you can operate your own campaigns more efficiently.

I doubt that many marketers will have invested the same time or thought in to their own POF systems, and much of the information could be repackaged for traffic sources like Facebook where it would be equally relevant.

That’s not to say I’m a glowing advocate of every theory preached in this guide. Tom’s argument that 100 campaigns consistently making $5/day are better than one making $500/day has been used to divide affiliate marketers for years.

I fall in to the category that would much rather manage a single $500/day campaign, than spend my afternoon plugging tiny holes in tiny $5 campaigns. That’s just too much micro-management for my taste.

I also disagree fundamentally with one of the guide’s earlier suggestions that advertising to young men is easier than mature women. But I will avoid kicking up a fuss, blessed in the knowledge that this guide is likely to be consumed by a legion of Warriors who will follow that pointer to a tee.

As far as the quality of writing goes, I’d like to thank Tom for releasing an ebook that is readable, eloquent and a distinct improvement on many of the other ‘Mastery Guides‘ in circulation that have me gouging out my own eyeballs in disgust. Presentation is one of the areas where my own Premium Posts are in sore need of improvement, so I’ll be taking a page out of Tom’s book here. Literally. Sccchwipe.

All in all, I would recommend the 7-Day Mastery Guide to beginners and intermediates on the POF platform. It’s not flowing with campaign ideas, but then it doesn’t need to be. This is a practical, comprehensive and immaculate presentation on how to get your house in order. It will bring structure to your campaigns while focusing your mind on sustainability and scalability, the only qualities that really matter.

Recommended This Week

Check out the iPyxel blog for some free tips and pointers to go along with the POF Mastery Guide.
My own detailed assault on monetizing Plentyoffish is covered in Volumes 1 and 3 of Premium Posts, which have both received widespread praise. Grab your copies now. Also, watch out for Volume 4 which will be landing next month and covering some brand new topics that I think you’re going to enjoy.
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Lessons Taken From My First (24) Years

Jan 27 2012

I can remember only embarrassing figments of my last few birthday celebrations, and sometimes I consider that a blessing in disguise. Between the ages of 18 and 22, I must have untagged enough photos to fill an entire hard drive with scandal.

Yesterday by comparison, my 24th birthday, was a relatively sedate affair.

Instead of scraping pizza from a beer-sodden kitchen counter, I carved steak from a pool of watercress and braised shallots. Instead of being spanked, and whipped, and publicly abused by Geordie strippers with candles not designed for cakes, I enjoyed the quiet company of my girlfriend, who thankfully, was not carrying handcuffs.

Unlike those who create New Year’s Resolutions to focus on their goals, I prefer to wait until I’m hanging up my birthday cards. I use the moment to reflect on all that I’ve achieved, or haven’t, and I redefine goals for the year ahead.

I’ve always seen New Year’s Resolutions as a shameless merry-go-round of excuses. If January 1st arrives and you’ve missed your targets, there’s little sense of failure in setting the same goals again. But there’s something much more powerful about using your age as a measurement of development.

“Before I turn 24, I want to achieve…”

As opposed to the open-ended, “My New Year’s Resolution is to…”

You could be setting the same resolution for the rest of your life, but you’ll never turn 24 again.

Most people don’t need to endure such a rigorous round of annual self-appraisals. But then, most people already have structure to their working lives. It comes in the form of a career ladder.

You aim for promotion at 25, a nice middle-management role at 30, senior responsibility at 40 and perhaps one day, with fingers crossed and wood touched, a stake in the company at 50.

Your career ladder is placed before you in granite stone. If you haven’t climbed sufficient rungs by your next birthday, you’ll choose politics or mismanagement as your justification, backed up by a hope, a prayer, and a promise from the wife that things will ‘fall in to place‘ soon.

I’m generalizing quite badly, but from a personal perspective, I never felt the same pressure to succeed as a 21 year old web developer, that I do as a 24 year old master of my own destiny. I think that’s partly down to having nobody to blame but myself.

We love hierarchies of order. For an Internet Marketer, there’s no hierarchy. We can only compare our fortunes with those posting screenshots of their earnings, and the forum members recounting stories of ‘how much I earned today’.

In a typical job environment, we look at ageing directors and senior managers with fading hairlines as the best representations of what we hope to become. These figureheads are reassuring to anybody with a 9-5 because they remind us that time is still on our side, or more importantly, that experience breeds power.

The same comfort does not extend to Internet Marketers, or anybody who runs a business online.

We are forced to look to the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world for our perception of what is achievable. The scale of relative achievement for online businesses is simply immense, and we formulate our own hierarchies around these vaunted young entrepreneurs. We want to be like them: rich, famous, powerful.

The fact that many of our role models rose out of nowhere to take the world by storm gives us many sleepless nights. The ambitious prodigy in his 9-5 may wish to leap up the career ladder, but it’s difficult to find examples where the road to success has been travelled at the speed of light, as it is so frequently by Internet millionaires.

The jump from office cubicle to director’s executive suite is daunting but clearly mapped. We assimilate that time, politics and good fortune will get us there someday, so we aren’t hard on ourselves for the years that go by where nothing seems to happen.

For an Internet Marketer, the years that pass without huge success can be crippling to morale.

When people like Zuckerberg transcend industries before leaving college, it scrambles our perception of the hierarchy. We no longer associate role models with those who have accumulated vast swathes of experience and paid their dues; we associate them with brilliance, innovation and the ability to rise from basement dwelling zeroes to billionaire heroes in the blinking of an eye.

The weight of expectation we shoulder by simply knowing what is possible in our industry makes it difficult to measure success in any reasonable manner.

In short, we lose access to all the excuses that justify the career ladder’s predictably slow ascent.

We’re forced to accept that any mismanagement, politics or glass ceilings are strictly of our own making.

The regular reminders that other young entrepreneurs are blowing up billion dollar empires before their 21st birthdays adds even more pressure to our lives. We compare ourselves religiously, and it’s difficult to keep success in perspective when the scale of achievement is so huge.

What kind of career allows for you to double your income on a yearly basis and still feel hopelessly at sea? I’ve tormented myself on many occasions, stargazing at the obscure wealth I know to exist, while resenting my own good progress just because some Internet Marketer somewhere is even further ahead.

These are troubles that are best kept in check by developing a sense of what success means to you as an individual, rather than as an industry average. So when I was setting my new goals yesterday, for the first time in five years, my #1 target did not involve taking over the world.

Some might call that a stain on my ambition.

“Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

Well… I fucking hate that quote.

Every time I hear it, I feel like offering the dimwit a straight swap with one of the Russian Cosmonauts currently lost in space. Go and see how much they enjoyed missing the moon.

Whimsical ambition should never be favoured over realistic, achievable targets. And that’s probably the biggest lesson I’ve taken from the last year.

Recommended This Week:

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