Training Fail and A Lesson Learned

Even though I have been doing a lot better with my sales performance, there's still room for improvement. This is 100% due to my anxiety and confidence issues, which I am working on in therapy, but of course I'm not going to tell this to my manager. So he set me up for some additional "coaching" today by having one of our top performers sit with me and listen to my calls for 30 minutes.

A customer called in to close his account. When I asked him why, he said that they were consolidating and no longer using this card, so they need to get rid of it. This man has been a customer since 1998. His credit line was $30,000 with a $0 balance, and his APR was 7.24%V. Basically an awesome customer that we do not want to lose.

I showed appreciation for his business and flat out told him I didn't want to lose his business. If he's looking to consolidate his debt and pay off balances, I can help him do that by using this account. He had an excellent promotion for 0% interest on balance transfers until February 2015. The transaction fee, which is normally 4% of the total, would be capped at $199. He politely declined.

I checked under the new promotions window. "What if I could extend that 0% out until May 2015?" He was really nice, but he declined again. I thanked him for his time, told him I would need to transfer him to an account manager to handle the account closure, and transferred him to retention.

So what did our top performer have to say about all this? "I never would have thought to transfer him to retention. After he turned down those offers, I would have just gone ahead and closed the account." 

Believe me when I tell you that he learned more from me today than I could ever learn from him. If a customer is "retention eligible" and wants to close the account,especially for a customer with this status, you always transfer to retention. That is the whole purpose of the retention department: to retain the customer's business!

So what did I learn from this experience? If that jackass can be a top performer, then so can I! The only thing this idiot does better than me is be persistent and consistent in his offers to the customers.