Interview with a peer- the worst sales experience.

Today I spoke with a fellow student who used to work at a health care facility in the customer service call center. I asked him to tell me about the worst experience he had while working in his department to see if I could try to relate it back to our class discussions.

He started his tale, “I work at a medical group in the customer service department. We typically get called by hospitals and doctors and insurance providers who are trying to either get paid or we refused payment on medical claims. When a provider calls us, they inquiring about if they are getting paid by insurance companies. When insurance companies call, they are wondering why their members were billed.”

Me: “So, what do you think the worst experience was that you had while working at the call center?”

Him: “Hmmm, the worst experience…. Well, there’s this one chiropractor’s office that called a lot.  They were pretty notorious within the office for being rude. One day, during my training this guy from that office calls. He was wanting to see if his claim was paid, and also wanted to ask about some information on these additional documents he had requested. I look over the claim and then go to look over the documents that he had requested- but there aren’t any additional documents. So, I tell him, ‘Sir, I’m sorry we don’t have any additional documents on file.’ He asks me another five times, in five different ways, and each time I tell him that we don’t have what he is looking for. Finally the guy explodes at me. He told me I wasn’t doing my job, that he wanted to talk to my supervisor, and to ‘mark his words’ because he would make sure I was fired. I passed him over to the gal that was training me to let him talk to her, and she told him the same thing I told him, but was a little more clear with him about what a jerk he was being. We eventually forwarded him to my boss’ voicemail and never heard a thing about it again.”

So, what can we learn from this? While this scenario isn’t a traditional form of the word sales, it’s a good example of a typical sales problem- dealing with unreasonable customers and clients. I think often times in sales or customer service, we are told that the customer is always right, and we should do everything we can to please the unreasonable customer to maintain the repertoire of the business. But as we discussed in class, sometimes it is best to let people (the unreasonable customer) go. My friend’s superior and his boss weren’t shaken by the rudeness of the customer, nor did they change their strategy for dealing with the situation. In their experience, they knew it was okay to brush off the unreasonable client. As a trainee and a worker, my friend felt less inclined to do so, but rather tried to answer him five times. This makes sense, because as a new hire and trainee, the goal of the job should be to try to resolve things without the help of superiors and to try to make clients happy. But, again, as we discussed, this isn’t always possible and sometimes we need to let clients go.