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Fuzzy Logic Misadventures in a Telstra retail store
Fuzzy Logic Misadventures in a Telstra retail store | Misadventures in a Telstra retail store |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Sunday, 17 February 2008 | |
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I advised a friend to take a look at Telstra’s HTC Touch Dual 850, because she’s a Windows Mobile smartphone user, an existing Telstra customer, and she was in a shopping centre where there was a Telstra store. I’m in Melbourne, and my friend is in Sydney, and we were talking on the phone about it, so she went to the store and asked the salesperson if she could have a look at the new HTC Touch. Unbelievably, he was adamant they didn’t sell it. Of course I was incredulous – the HTC Touch Dual 850 was made specifically for Telstra’s 850Mhz Next G network. But she then saw some sales information about it on a counter, and said to the staff member ‘it’s this phone’, and he said ‘oh’, and was a bit sheepish, and said ‘I’ve been away for two weeks’, as if this was some kind of legitimate excuse for not knowing what was on sale in the store he purported to be a sales representative for. Then he said ‘let me see if we’ve got any in stock’ – and came back with a box. She explained that we needed to trial it first before buying, but were told that ‘no, it’s not possible’. So my friend then called me back to explain they weren’t going to let her test the phone first. I asked to speak to the salesperson, and explained this was an expensive phone and she really needed to test it first because she’d had a bad experience with an older Windows Mobile phone and got burnt because she hadn’t been able to test it the first time. The sales rep flatly refused to allow any testing. I said that if you can test drive an expensive car, you should be able to test an expensive phone, and why was this a problem? We wanted to spend money – lots of it – with them, after all. All throughout the call, the sales person sounded incredibly annoyed and at this point huffed with a surprising level of rudeness that ‘well we don’t sell cars, we sell phones’. I was stunned. Was this sales person actively trying to lose a sale here? It certainly seemed like it. Well, as my introduction has stated, people rely on their phones far more than they rely on their cars, and while a phone doesn’t cost anywhere near as much as a car, it’s still a big purchase for many people. I’m not finished yet, heck, I’ve barely started, and you need to know why it was so important to be able to try the phone out first – please read onto page 2. |
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