When offering your customers a choice…

…be careful how you structure the choice.

My wife and I recently received two offers, one from GE Financial and the other from Bank of America.

GE Financial sent us a notice with our credit card bill saying that they would be calling our cell phone numbers with offers and that these calls might result in our incurring costs.  They went on to say that if we didn’t want to receive these calls we’d have to call a toll-free number to opt out.  Fortunately the opt-out process was automated and didn’t take a great deal of time.  Still, it was time we would have preferred to use in other ways.

Bank of America sent a notice saying that we were being rewarded as good customers with a new card that provided additional benefits.  Then we were told that the new card would have a new account number and that we’d have to notify all of the vendors that we use of the account number change.  The additional “benefits” weren’t adequate to make us want to contact vendors so we decided to opt out.

Bank of America didn’t provide any opt out options in the notice.  When we called customer service and spent the requisite 15 minutes holding, we were told that we needed to call another number if we wanted to opt out.  That resulted in another 15 minute hold.  When we finally got through, the BOA rep said that he’d “try” to get it stopped.  Three times during the conversation he stated that his records showed that we’d received the notice a month earlier.  The implication being that we should have contacted them earlier if we didn’t want the upgraded card.  We’ll see what happens with this one.  I suspect we’ll be using a different bank’s credit card soon.

I would not have thought this concept to be counter-intuitive, but apparently it is.  When changing your offers, allow your customers to opt in instead of forcing them to opt out.  Showing respect for their time and their right to choose will go a long way to solidifying your relationship. 

I realize that there are times when a product or service is being used by too few customers to make it cost effective to continue that offering.  At that point you should notify customers of the planned discontinuance of your offering and the reason for it.  Then allow them to choose to upgrade or find an alternative to what you’re providing.  The keys here are an explanation for the discontinuance and adequate notice for them to adjust to the change.   

If you have similar experiences with forced choices and techniques for dealing with them, please post a comment.  In the meantime, if there are topics you’d like me to address send me an email at dale@furtwengler.com

Tags: counter-intuitive thinking

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 7:34 am and is filed under Marketing, Selling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.