Skip to main content

Great customer service: Two cans of Red Bull sold

I am uncertain who runs the M&S store at the service station near Benson in Oxfordshire but last night Ahmed upsold me two cans of Red Bull that I really didn't want.

It was raining hard and I was quite tired when I pulled in to fill up the tank. 64 and a bit litres of diesel later I was delighted that the total on the pump was less than £100. As I looked at this I saw a sign that said buy two cans of promoted beverages and get 5p a litre off your fuel.

Inside the shop, after a comfort break, I bought a bag of crisps and stood behind another customer at the till. I noticed by the door a second piece of point of sale with the offer on it. After she completed her purchase, I handed the crisps to Ahmed, the teller, and put my credit card next to the payment terminal.

Are you interested in the soft drink offer, Ahmed asked, with a smile. I looked at him and as I did so his eyes flicked to the display of Red Bull behind me. As he was smiling I thought about it for a second and felt obliged to ask him how much the cans cost. He said something like £2.36. I shook my head, thinking that was a lot, and said I couldn't work out if it was a good deal or not.

It's a good deal for you as you've bought so much fuel, he fired straight back at me with another smile. Why not scan a couple of cans and then I'll tell you what the price is, he said. And then you can make up your mind.

I turned to pick up two cans, apologising to the customer in the queue behind me. He scanned the cans and the price was over £100 and then fell below £100 as the deal kicked in.

OK, I said, pushing my card into the terminal. Are you planning to set up your own business, I asked him. That was a good upsell.He smiled.

Back in the car, as the windscreen wipers battled to contain the rain, I thought about the two cans of Red Bull rolling around on the passenger seat. I tried to do the maths and thought it cost me around £1.50. I didn't want to drink either of them. But I still smiled and thought great customer service.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Anonymous5 April 2013 at 14:35

    Wow, that was definitely impressive! I think the best thing about what happened was that you didn’t really feel all that silly for having bought two cans of Red Bull that you were probably not going to be drinking yourself. I think the clerk was just the right amount of sales – pushy without being annoying – and that’s what won you over. I think if you had declined the second offer, he may not have had a problem with that either. That would have showed that he treated you not just as another source of income, but as an actual human being with your own preferences, which may or may not have matched up with what he was trying to sell.

    - Jeremiah Hicks

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unknown16 July 2013 at 14:50

      Hi Jeremiah, Thank you for the great feedback. Nick

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital disruption in the UK wholesale space

“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Five things to learn from Waitrose

Interim results from Waitrose this week confirm the industry figures that show the upmarket supermarkets and convenience stores are leading the market (albeit from a 4.2% share according to Kantar Worldpanel). Charlie Mayfield, the chairman, highlights many reasons for its success and here are five that local retailers should consider. Marketing works. Waitrose claims that more than 370,000 extra customer transactions resulted from its spring tie-up with Delia Smith and Heston Blumenthal in the first eight weeks. This autumn, it launches a cookery school. Engaged shoppers are more profitable shoppers! You need a value offering. 17 per cent of Waitrose sales are from its value range, called essentials. Momentum works. Its strategy is to bring Waitrose to more people in more places. It invested in 75,000 square feet of extra selling space in the first half of this year, including three convenience stores. In the second half of the year, it is adding eight convenience stores. Str...
Post a Comment
Read more

The secrets of persuasion: No short cuts.

The best moment in my interview with Terri Sjodin, who teaches many of the world’s top corporations how to sell persuasively, is when she smiles at me and asks to hear my “elevator speech".   My mind literally goes blank. The author of Small Message, Big Impact , her new book on how to craft powerful messages that persuade people to listen to you, has thrown the gauntlet at me. There was nowhere to hide. I had just told her how I had used her book to write out my three minute speech to open the Local Shop Summit. She listened patiently to my pitch, thought for a moment, and said: “I bet you had an illustration in your mind of an independent who really capitalised on your ideas and has taken them to the bank.” I could swear she was reading my mind. I blushed and nodded. “So you should open with this story,” she said. “Start out by saying: ‘Let me open the conference by telling you a great story with a happy ending.’ So the audience will say to themselves: ‘He is goi...
Post a Comment
Read more