The ThreeStore at Thurrock Lakeside
I was quite excited to check out the new ThreeStore at Thurrock Lakeside. I was doubly excited to spy their newly announced Nokia E61 on display. Unlike the Vodafone store next door, the ThreeStore’s Nokia E61 was real — you could play with it. I was very, very impressed with the screen resolution and the speed of the internet access. I checked out Yahoo and played around with the various web site favourites in the phone’s bookmarks.
No camera. That’s a bit of an arse. But I can live with that.
I asked the guy — you can see him standing there in the black in the centre of the picture — if he could check out my Three account and see when I’m due for an upgrade.
He couldn’t, alas. Just like those annoying T-mobile-branded-but-not-really-Tmobile stores, they’re not all properly connected.
When you walk into a Vodafone shop, they can look up your details and talk to YOU about YOUR account. You feel like you’re having a relationship with Vodafone — it doesn’t matter whether it’s the store in Glasgow, Edinburgh or Heathrow, you have a relationship. I like that.
Anyway I’ve got to ‘phone up’. He also suggested I’d get a better deal if I phoned up.
For a communications company, it’s a strange strategy. Surely in a market saturated to the hilt, you’d want to take any opportunity whatsoever to engage with your customers. As far as Three are concerned, I’m a boring-arse who never ever does anything with his account. Well, rarely, anyway. I’ve used one message out of my allotted 100 this month. Now, that’s good news for Three because it means I’m paying my 30 quid and not ‘using’ my allowance. But it’s bad news, because my spend is with T-mobile. Totally.
So about 250-300 quids worth of monthly business (£3k/year) walked into the ThreeStore this afternoon to engage with them. They turned it away. Not directly. But they culture adopted appears to assume that it’s ok to tell folk to ‘phone up’. Because I simply won’t. I can’t be bothered. I CAN be bothered if you put it in front of me and I can walk away with a handset.
I only walked into the store because I was in the vicinity getting my hair cut. What a shame. If I was the consumer marketing chap, I’d be doing my nut. How can you let that level of revenue walk into the store, have a cool browse around, be PREPARED TO PAY and then turn’em away?
The chap should have recognised the steam coming out of my left pocket (that’s the credit card MELTING… the money burning a whole in my pocket). He should have recognised the fact that I lingered more than would be ‘average’ playing with the Nokia E61. He should have realised that it was me who engaged him — a sure fire sign of interest.
He should have sized me up and noticed that I’m not your standard £15 a month pay as you go oik. This is evident by my interest in the E61 which is far from your standard consumer friendly phone.
His eyes should have lit up the moment I said ‘Could you check when my contract is up?’
He should have sat me down and said, ‘Yes sir…’
Even if they’re stupid non connected CRM systems are so screwed up that he can’t even query my account status, he should have got over that by making the call to Three’s customer services there and then.
I tell you now I’d have spent 200 quid there an then. On something. The E61? Maybe. One of their fancy Nokias? Probably. I was considering changing my price plan to something higher and actually giving the account a bit of use.
He should have been the interface between me and the STUPID CRM systems and processes. I don’t want to hang around talking to a chap called ‘Kevin’ in India for 10 minutes telling him my life story ONLY to be told I can have the device in a few days. A few days isn’t good enough for an impulse buy. I’ll be back to remembering the critical issue of stupid internet access restrictions and WHY I don’t use the account as a primary one.
Is this a culture flaw? Don’t think so. Is it a CRM flaw? Quite possibly. I don’t think it’s necessarily the sales guy to blame. He looked a bit disheartened when I said ‘when is my contract up’ — possibly because he gets better commission from signing new customers? And possibly because there’s F-all he can do for me as an existing customer, except suggest I ‘phone’.
They got everything else right. Nice shop environment. Proper phones to actually USE and experience, instead of those plastic sample ones in other phone shops. Clear branding. Simple and encouraging messages. The whole experience made me want to buy. Up until I was told to phone. That’s totally incompatible with the purchase mode I was in. The shop floor marketing chaps had done their job. They’d converted me to a sale. The rest of the system couldn’t deliver.
You never know, for the sake of this blog, I might actually phone them up.
I looked on the MyThree website to see if there was an upgrades section.
No.
In fact there’s a section where you can easily add new options and text packages (etc) to your account. BUT you can’t take them off. Total arse.
So, I’ll phone then, at some point, when I can be bothered.
