Media Evolution – Hear the Roar

I certainly get that in this economy, as new customers are few and far between, upselling to the current ones is just smart business, but there’s a difference between consultative sales and badgering. Geico and Walgreens both crossed the line with me. I offer these as examples of what not to do.

I’ve been with Geico for my auto insurance for seven years now. I’ve been totally satisfied, and when I had an accident last year they really came through for me. But I recently went onto the Geico site to see if adding my son’s car to my policy might save him some money. Ever since then I’ve had daily calls on my cell phone from a toll free number with no message. I finally called it back – it was Geico. I had to go through a lot of automated attendant rigamarole of identifying myself to get to someone who told me that the reason for the call was my request for a quote. I told them to stop calling. They continued to call. I called again and again told them to stop calling. The last call was the night before last at 10:06pm. It woke me up.  My guess is this is an outsourcer for Geico using an auto dialer. So I’ve now called a sales supervisor (again another call, and more time spent by me) to tell her the story. She promised to take care of it. She was very helpful and I’m confident she will. But if it happens again I just might leave Geico. What I certainly WON’T do again is go on its site to explore any additional purchases. UPDATE: After three discussions with a corporate executive it turns out the calls were about recent changes to my bill, and prior info was inaccurate.  To their credit, once I got to the right level of authority, they worked hard to get me an answer, and were very responsive.  I am confident there will be no more 10pm calls. Still, I shouldn’t have had to work this hard to resolve it.

Walgreens has supplied my prescriptions for more than three years now. I’m very happy with their service, especially their automated refill call in. I just left my job and had to find my own insurance. Knowing the pharmacy coverage would not be as extensive I refilled one arthritis-pain prescription each 30 days even though I don’t use it regularly. I was trying to save money.  Now I have enough for several months.

I got a letter from Walgreens last week reminding me of my prescriptions and telling me that as a service to me I was now set up to have my prescriptions automatically refilled every 30 days. They didn’t even ask if I wanted that – just did it! I called the local Walgreens and told them to take me off that auto-refill program. He sighed and said they’d been getting calls all day with the very same request. “The letter wasn’t worded very well,” he said. Indeed not.  Forcing me into some thinly-disguised upsell that I didn’t ask for under the guise of “serving” me is insulting to my intelligence. Had I gotten a letter (or better yet an email) that said, “Dear loyal Walgreens customer, we’re taking the time to let our current valued customers know about this service we now have. If you’d like to take part all you have to do is click here (or call this number),” and let me CHOOSE which prescriptions were automatically refilled I would have done it. But even if I chose not to, I would have been pleased that Walgreens created this. The impression Walgreens would have left me with would have been a whole lot more positive than the one I know have of it.

Both of these companies had the right idea – to upsell to their current customers. Both crossed the line. If I had had less of a long-term pleasant experience with both I would have stopped doing business with them because of this. And there are probably folks who have.