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Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
Barence writes "An undercover investigation has revealed how Dell's online sales staff take liberties with the truth when trying to sell customers new PCs. One member of staff told an undercover reporter that he would need a PC with a good graphics card to download digital photos. Another, who was more incompetent than devious, was asked how many photos could be stored on a 250GB hard disk. 'Its[sic] on average 2 MB then 1024 MB * 2,' came the bewildering reply. Meanwhile, a sales assistant at supermarket Tesco told the reporter that netbooks got their name because 'a Japanese man on a plane fell asleep with a laptop on his thighs and was horribly burned, so the industry has dropped the name laptop.'"
I was shopping for a new laptop for my wife a year or two ago and browsing Circuit City (no intentions of buying there, I just like to get my hands on the products before I buy them online). One of the "salesmen" asked me if I needed help and I decided to play along. I told him I was just checking out a few models for an upcoming purchase for my wife.
Him: Will you need a Microsoft to go with it?
Me: A Microsoft what? It comes with Windows Vista, doesn't it? Microsoft makes a lot of software.
Him: Will she need any office software?
Me: Yeah, but I've got a copy of Office XP (maybe it's 2003, I don't recall) I don't use anymore since I bought a Mac, so she'll just use that.
Him: Oh, no, you can't do that. Office XP won't work on this computer
Me: Huh? It should work fine, it's recent enough, Vista works with just about anything.
Him: Nope, Office XP/2003 doesn't work on Vista at all, you need Office 2007.
Me: Are you sure that it's not just that Office 2007 works better than the older versions on Vista?
Him: No, it's not going to work at all.
And then people wonder why sales dropped through the floor when they laid off their best staff.
fascinating video from inside Dell's phone sales team....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TROhlThs9qY
What I find weird is... I walk into my nearest Best Buy: Their mobile staff is really REALLY knowledgeable; their computer staff are knee-dragging morons! Is the mobile section of Best Buy a better money maker and worth having knowledgeable staff more-so than the computer section?
Returns are more of a pain to deal with.
Of course, that's just anecdotal stuff. Plenty of stores do give out bonus goodies (or firings) based on total money made per individual worker, and there are plenty of people that just don't anything about electronics but needed a job badly.
The incompetence of the sales staff at Best Buy is not restricted to the computer department. Case in point: the other night I went to look for a cordless phone with a switching power supply - i.e. something that could run on either 110V or 220V.
Looking at the shelf of phones, none of the boxes gave any indication of input voltage or being dual-voltage capable. I asked a droid which of the phones would accept 220V and he said
"All of them."
"Are you sure? All of them?"
"Any of these will work."
I looked over the phones on display until I found one with a power brick attached. It clearly said Input: 110-120V AC.
"What about this one? It says 110V AC input."
He squinted at the brick and said
"No look. It says 250 here."
I looked where he was pointing and sure enough, it said Output: 250mW 12V DC. ..."
"Okay thanks. I think I'll do some research online or something and maybe come back in tomorrow with a specific model number in hand
If these guys can't master the simple concept of input and output voltages, there really is very little hope of them navigating the world of memory bandwidth, sockets, or video performance.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
I had to do something fairly similar for my grandmother's computer. Only problem was, the hard drive was working perfectly fine before she took it to Best Buy. I had given her a hand-me-down computer with Linux on it, and she wanted to install Windows on it. So she had to go buy a copy. Somehow in the process of installing Windows--an arduous task that involves the opening of the DVD drive--they had managed to open the case, unscrew the hard drive from the case, and then bust it up enough that it took over 24 hours for Windows to finish installing. I know this because they kindly provided my grandmother a receipt that had logs of everything they did, which I went over.
The best part is when they decided the slowness was due to the PC not having enough RAM for XP. Which is curious, because I had run XP on that PC just fine. So they tell her they need to buy 2 x 1 GB sticks. Eventually we managed to get a refund on all of that stuff after Windows failed to boot up.
After I had to head back to my home state, she was left with no computer and, even worse, no one who even remotely knows that they're talking about with computers. She went to the same Best Buy and asked for assistance on what computer to buy. They equipped her, someone whose most intensive task is copying photos off of a camera, with a quad core desktop with like 4 or 8 GB of RAM.
SSC
I worked computer sales at an Office Depot. At that time, they did not pay commission. I got a (really low) wage and sales was just part of my job. (The most important part, though.)
However, despite that, it doesn't change much from what you've said. Even if there are no commissions, sales (especially of warranties) are tracked and are linked to rewards or pay raises.
I was one of the few salesman I've ever met that put the customer before the company. I got a -lot- of compliments from customers because I would explain anything and everything to them and put no pressure on them whatsoever.
Why am I so special? I've done computer repair and computer programming all my life. That job was only because I couldn't get a 'real' job. I really didn't care if I lost it and the money was crap, so I got my reward by actually helping people. I even sent people to other stores when things were significantly cheaper. (It didn't happen often, though, and I saw almost every one of those people again for a future purchase.)
As for the situation you describe, it's due to the customers' ignorance. If they would educate themselves, even a little, they wouldn't fall into that trap. This is true about cars as well, though, and we all know how long that has gone on.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
The way it works at BBY (worked there years back so I have some insight) is that they have goals to meet as a department, but they are not on commission. The goals generally have to do with straight up sales, attach rates (accessories), and service/repair plan attach rates. Generally speaking there's not anything in the way of monetary rewards for meeting these goals, for the line employees, but if your numbers are high your chances of promoting up are very good, and if not, well you will forever be stuck in the purgatory of being the bum who gets stuck with the short stick when hours are handed out.
In 1999, I worked sales at PCs For Everyone, a (now-defunct, mostly) whitebox dealer in Cambridge, MA. They were a big operation, with a stellar reputation and good draw. People would drive for hundreds of miles to get a PCsFE system. As New England's largest whitebox dealer, they had about 15 guys in the back room assembling computers on any given day, and the burn-in racks were usually backlogged. We were always busy - when we weren't selling systems we were selling parts, and we got so packed on the weekends that there was a numbered ticketing system for counter help. I worked my ass off there 5 and a half days a week (the mandatory sales meeting was on my day off) and brought in, by my own conservative estimate, about $2M in gross sales during my year working for them. You wouldn't believe how many Celeron A 300's we went through. Those things went out the door like you could get high by smoking them.
I know a lot about personal computer internals. I knew even more back then. I spent at least an hour every night reading up on Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, and the other big hardware sites of 10 years back. I helped set up the demos, and I never sold anyone more computer than I thought they could reasonably need. I did product research, recommended new kit for us to sell, and did basic troubleshooting with customers, spending 1:1 time. I had a base of dedicated customers who would wait for me rather than deal with another salesman.
When stumped, other sales reps would come to me for answers much of the time. In short, if I haven't tooted my own horn enough, I was the goddamn bomb when it came to selling computers and parts.
In that year, I made a little over $22,000, and was shafted out of my bonus . I was gone on day 380, off to a job that paid 3 times as much that I got through a customer.
Taking away for a minute from the fact that my boss / the owner was a crook (and he was), even when shafting me that hard, here's the thing: I brought in $2M to a business myself, and that business 2 years later wasjust an online storefront.
There is no margin in computer sales. Even with a locally-respected brand name that drew customers from out-of-state, even when the owner was as crooked as Quasimodo's back, even when bringing in gross revenues in the tens of millions, the storefront was gone inside of a few years.
The reason PC sales sucks is because the margins are 0. The average PC salesman doesn't make dick unless he's selling in enterprise volumes, and you're lucky if they've even taken an A+ course. Anyone who genuinely enjoys both computers and sales quickly moves into sales engineering, or finds another lateral move that will net some income. The margins on each part are nil, the margins on systems are nil. CompUSA is gone because the margins were too slim. The Best Buy rep and the Dell consumer reps are incompetent because they're given 2 days with a 3-ring binder of training, then set loose on the floor. Like it or not, qualified sales staff costs money, and anyone with the know-how to be an effective salesperson with computers is going to chase the dollar out of that basement as soon as possible.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
This is a nasty problem because computers are not quite a commodity and not quite a geeky lab tool. People think of them as a commodity and companies try to sell them as a commodity but they require more care and feeding than say your toaster, microwave or VCR. Frankly if my VCR was as finicky and required the level of hand-holding (think frequent patching, etc) that my computer does, I'd toss it in the bin and get a new one.
It's a problem from both ends. Simple gadgets like a toaster do one established thing pretty much one way. Everybody has the same expectation of the outcome and anticipates the process pretty much the same. So we are intrinsically "trained" to know what to look for in the purchase of a toaster. Computers don't have such clearcut uses and functional pathways. This means that even tech savvy people are a bit lost in what they want from a computer (I'm agonizing on my next media server: atom or other processor, mirroring or raid 6, which case, hot-swap, etc). Combine this with sales staff whose knowledge matches their pay, and you have a recipe for chaos.
We complain bitch and moan about poorly trained sales staff, but at the same time, we want the widget at a brick and mortar store to be only ten cents more than online. We don't value well trained sales staff and good customer service. Some of us say we do, but "we" as a society feed our money to best-buy and wall-marts while many local higher caliber stores suffer and die because the prices are too high (which they have to be to cover the staff, etc). We are voting for crap employees with our wallets.
This extends to Dell online, they are leading the race to the bottom of computer sales. I suspect if you call up PSSC, you'll get somebody who knows something, but expect to pay more.
Sheldon
my husband works with a man that used to work for geek squad. He was fired after reporting that fellow geek's were stealing memory and hardware from unsuspecting clients. According to his departure paper, he was fired for not being a team player. Best buy and the geek squad are a bunch of thieves.
Years ago when I talked to them they proudly claimed they did not work on commission. However, every item had a 'point value' assigned to it, and if you reached certain tiers of points sold you would get a bonus added to your check. So since it was not a direct commission they could advertise that way to drag more people in thinking that their employees would be good honest folk since they weren't commission based sales.
I was trying to buy the sale of the week hard drive once and they were taking AGES to help me because they had people looking at computers. I watched one rep sell an elderly couple a high dollar gaming rig so they could email their child who was doing missionary work abroad. He ran off to get the paperwork for them to sign and I walked up, walked them all the way down to the other end of the display and pointed out a machine that was $1500 less. They were VERY happy. The associates, when they could finally be bothered to help me, got the drive and walked me to the front of the store like a criminal. I would have left, but the drive was a really good deal, and I was feeling pretty good about screwing them on the $1500 for being assholes.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
I have a solution. Start a retail chain and set up video chat screens to chat with a bunch of highly paid geek advisers. They do nothing but handle continuous questions from people interested in buying products of whatever type, and they try to give the best answers. By consolidating the entire nationwide chain to a few dozen advisers spread across the entire chain, the per-store training costs drop to a fraction of their current costs. Also, because your sales droids are only there to physically assist customers in carrying heavy products, fetching things from shelves, pushing the button that says "customer needs help", etc., your sales costs go down because you can hire Wal-Mart stock boys instead of people with a computer background.
The net win in the cost of doing business that way means that you can continue to make good profits without the need to resort to underhanded sales tactics to get more profit. This, in turn, leads to greater customer trust, which leads to brand loyalty, which leads to a long-term revenue stream.
Treat your customers with respect and they will respect you in return. Treat your customers with disdain, and you become nothing more than a purveyor of commodities, easily replaced by the next big thing to come along.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Sears, Roebuck salespeople are on commission, at least in the appliances and electronics departments. If anything, I think you get better service from them, but they definitely try to steer you to their highest-margin stuff.
They have to at least TRY to upsell. In fact, it is good salesmanship to start with the high end. You do not want to offend people by assuming they can only afford the wash tub and clothesline model.
;)
Being an educated consumer does not stop with computers. The consumer should know the rules by their 18th birthday. You want to buy, they want to sell; when you meet in the middle a deal is struck. Remember, the hallmark of a successful negotiation is when both parties walk away slightly unhappy.
I sold paint for a number of years on partial commission (don't ask what that means). We had a very moral knowledgeable staff of 4. Our numbers were high and steady even in the CY first quarter simply because of repeat business (few people paint in the Winter, but more than you'd think). We would actually inform our big buyers when pending sales/promotions were occurring. Often we would get very large orders that we could place ahead of time to have stock on hand for the promotion--they didn't have ERP systems 25 years ago.
Yeah my sister got a virus on her new PC and brought it to the Geek Squad. They told her she needed her hard drive wiped, but she had already spoken to me and I told her to hand them this piece of paper with the name of the virus on it- and for them to get the proper removal instructions and clean it off- no formatting the HD! (I didn't have time to do it).
They came back to her afterwards and said "Gee, that was easier than we though it would be!". *face palm*
I worked at a Mom & Pop computer repair place for two years. We had a retired electrical engineer professor (phd in EE) who did laptop mobo repairs. He was just happy to get out of the house and have some guys to hang around with while soldering power plug connectors back together. There was an ex-HP guy doing printer repairs and the boss who, while not a great out-of-box thinker, had a hell of a memory for parts and settings. Cool thing was, Christmas: $500 bonus and dinner out with open bar on $18/hr salary. The rest of my tech job history has been at corporate places and never got any type of bonus like that.
I drank what? -- Socrates
You handle peak times the same way as any other store. You bring in temp people. You may not get the best people during those times, but I guarantee you can find contractors willing to work on a 1 1/2 month contract from mid November through early January. That problem isn't in any way specific to this model. It's the same problem if your experts are at the store.
That said, with the model I proposed, it's a much easier problem to solve because you can hire these people without any need for them to actually be located anywhere near the people you're serving. Hire a handful of college CS students at universities to take shifts of as little as an hour or two between classes. Once you eliminate the physical constraints of the experts being on site, lots of problems just cease to be problems.
Also, because it's a queue system, your wait times can increase on average and the worst case times still diminish. It's not the difference between a 1 minute and a 65 second average wait that drives away customers. It's the "I couldn't find an employee to help me for twelve minutes" peak waits that drive people away.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.