01:50
Personal Selling & Negotiation
Guest Speaker: Mr. Michael Lee
5 highlighted points provided by the guest speaker during his course of sharing:
(1) Importance of Complaints
Singaporeans likes to complaint a lot on small things. In sales, complaints are very concerned of and worried about by the company. It is often the start of a problem. Complaints will affect a company on their sales and largely on their reputation which is very critical. When the reputation of the company goes down, it will in turn affect the sales and cause sales to drop as well. Citing an example shared by the guest speaker: the CEO of SMRT wasn't at fault for the major MRT train breakdowns. It is clearly known that her position does not cause the train to breakdown (i.e. even she is not the CEO of SMRT, MRT trains will still breakdown due to technical faults). However she still have to carry and bear the responsibilities to save the reputation of the company.
Direct complaints such as going directly to the retailer to express your unhappiness about their product or services is generally perceived to be better than indirect ones by the retailers. They are less harmful as only the company itself learns about the complaint. As compared to indirect ones, customers voiced out their complaints and unhappiness over social media such as Facebook and Twitter. This is serious, as more and more people get access to such platforms, complaints will be spread throughout the network within seconds. Making it worse, the power of social media does not permit company to do anything to stop the spread. Thus, more and more people will know about the complaints toward this company and reputation goes down instantly.
Therefore, complaints from the customers should be taken into consideration seriously and companies should never disregard customer's feedback.
(2) Issues associated with complaints
As mentioned by the guest speaker, complains are easier to resolve when it is valid, but not all complains can be resolved as it may not involve any reasoning and as for complains which involve ethical / legal issues, It usually means that the party is in for some big trouble if it is not handled well. Unethical practices needs to be address individually to resolve it. Personally I agree with the speaker as not all complains may be due to the companies fault, some customers just wants to find fault with us by pinpointing some minor errors out and making it a big issue.
He then gave us an example using a case study, in the case he mentioned that CPFDA is an act that protects the consumers against unfair practices which are unethical of illegal handled by consumer association. It is suppose to protect consumers from unethical and illegal issues. He also showed us statistics that during 2009, the consumer association of Singapore receive 21752 complains about not being treated fairly and only 1597 cases were answered.
But now consumers have a lot more protection under the consumer protection 10 acts. Time share is one of the important Acts which allows the employees to buy the use of a holiday home for the same weeks or weeks every year, at a fraction of the price of owning it all year round and without the exorbitant cost and worry of year round maintenance. In effect they are pre-buying holiday time, which they can use themselves, rent out, give away, sell or bequeath as they wish.
Timeshare has many different variations with the same basic concept. It is also called vacation ownership, holiday ownership and club time it is one of the fastest growing sectors of the holiday industry and with the arrival of large hotel groups that saw the benefits of Timeshare.
(2) Mis-selling
According to Mr. Lee mis-selling is an attempt by a salesperson to convince a customer to purchase a good or service that is not appropriate for the client. This is a very unethical practice, because the salesperson just wants to make the sale and does not care whether it is useful to the customer or not.
Most complaints from customers come from mis-selling. After they have bought a product or service they say, that the product/service does not meet their expectations.
Ms. Lee afterwards talked about an example, where the MES was not satisfied as with the record of its past performance in providing financial advices.
Ms. Lee strongly recommended that everybody who does sales as a profession should be very careful to not mis-sell.
(3) Cheating
One of the points that Mr Lee pointed out was Cheating. It refers to the immoral way of achieving a goal. It is generally used for the breaking of rules to gain advantage in a competitive situation.
One example that Mr Lee gave was a staff name Hazel Thea Puyaoan Vicente who works in a telemarketing, Touch & Tech was imprisoned for two years three months due to cheating. In order to hit her sales target, she cheated and forged her applicants’ pay slips and inflating their salaries so that their annual pay would meet the minimum income. She also doctored their letters of extension for employment as the bank will only approve applicants who have a minimum of one year validity remaining on their employment passes.
This is a good example to show that Cheating will lead to regrettable consequences. Although people are pressured to do unlawful things at times, it is strongly encouraged to not cheat as it will not only destroy your reputation, it will also destroy your true self. Apart from that people view of you will change negatively thus it is advisable for us to not cheat.
(5) Misrepresentation
Misrepresentation is said to be the giving of false information by one party to the other before the contract is made, which means that what the person says is untrue, only wants to induce the other party to make the contract.
The following are example given by the guest speaker to illustrate the terms, misrepresentation:
1. A salesperson sell a customer a particular phone and claim that the phone has got this feature, however, when the customer purchased it and went home to try out his phone, he couldn’t find the feature that the salesperson has provided him/her with during the selling process.
2. An insurance company sell a policy to a customer and it has assure its customer that it will give him/her a certain amount of returns, but actually, the company are not guarantee.
A real case example given by him would be the DBS bank and the Lehman Brother incident where thousands of complaints were sent to the ten financial institutions that distributed the notes and one of which is the DBS Bank. Some who were dissatisfied with the response they got took their cases to the Financial Industry Disputes Resolution Centre.
The first lawsuit arising from the minibond saga was by a group of 204 investors who sued DBS Bank in July 2009 for the S$17 million they lost from investing in High Notes 5, as they were unhappy with the bank’s low settlement offers.
This misrepresentation is unethical as what the DBS bank claim is untrue, thus when its consumers invest in the High Notes 5, they were unhappy with the bank’s low settlement offers and this is how it led to complaints and eventually started suing DBS bank for the S$17 million they have lost from investing in the bank bonds.
Additionlly, the guest speaker touched on the three types of misrepresentation that a business can have and the negative consequences as a result of misrepresentation.
Innocent Misrepresentation
A statement made honestly with reasonable grounds for believing in its truth.
Negligent Misrepresentation
A statement made honestly but without reasonable ground for believing in its truth.
Fraudulent Misrepresentation
This is when the representor makes a statement dishonestly, knowing it to be untrue or being reckless as to whether it was true or not.
Next, the guest speaker highlighted that a company’s unethical practices can have negative consequences for the company such as it will affect the reputation and tarnish the company branding and image due to the negative word of mouth and the fast spreading of the company’s unethical practices on the internet, newspaper and other media sources. This would lead to the harm of the sales of goods as customers may boycott goods produced by a company known for unethical behavior. Additionally, it may lead to a drop in stock price as investors will be unwilling to buy shares from companies known to transact business dishonestly as investing in dishonest firms will result in poor returns.
Therefore, it is important to adopt ethical practices when doing business with others so as to prevent any complaints and negative consequences which may cause harm to the company and by adopting ethical practices would eventually get higher revenues or the business as there is a demand from positive consumer support, improved brand and business awareness and recognition, better employee motivation and recruitment and lastly, new sources of finance such as from ethical investors.
