How to Offer Financing to Customers
Nowadays you would be hard pressed to shop in a department store and not be offered a store brand credit card. But department stores aren’t the only places offering their own credit cards now. There is financing everywhere you go, even on many websites.
As a customer service employee, you are most likely pressured to reach some sort of quota of credit applications in a given period of time. Follow the steps provided below to become better at offering financing to customers.
6 Steps to Offer Financing to Customers
1. Become familiar with the benefits of your company’s financing
Most department stores offer special discounts, yearly events and other such benefits to their card holders. The more familiar you are with these benefits the better you will be at shaping your pitch.
2. Become familiar with any fees associated with your company’s financing
Is there an annual fee? Often customers will ask upfront if there is any fee associated with a company’s financing, and so you will not only need to be prepared to answer such a question, you will also need to be prepared to “overshadow” any fees that your company’s financing may entail, so that you can draw your customers’ attention away from the fees and direct it toward the benefits of the financing that you are offering them.
3. Decide what benefits of the financing that you are offering are the best, those that you really want to stress when offering financing to your customer
Then the rest of the benefits of your financing can be used as plan B to sway those customers who appear to be interested but aren’t completely convinced.
4. Come up with a unique “script” for offering your customers financing
Many times when customers frequent a store they hear the same cookie-cutter financing pitches, usually ones taken from training manuals or videos, and so as soon as they hear the first couple of words of the pitch they immediately tune the employee out.
Coming up with your own unique pitch may help you avoid those customers whose head starts to vigorously shake back and forth at the beginning of your pitch.
Getting your customers to hear your pitch is a major hurdle that you need to overcome in order to convince more customers to fill out a financing application.
5. Be polite and honest
No one likes the sales associate who talks over you when you tell them that you aren’t interested in what they are offering, nor do they like to be fooled into doing something that they wouldn’t do if they had all the facts.
The Golden Rule still applies when it comes to offering customers financing.
6. Offer financing to each and every customer
You may have gotten into the habit of only offering financing to those customers that look like they would be interested who also look like they would be approved, but you need to break this habit.
You might find yourself surprised by the wide variety of people who are wiling to fill out a credit application as well as by the wide variety of people who are approved. Don’t count anyone out based on what you see on the outside.
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