Most ISPs recognize the importance of upselling these days. Even with how essential the Internet is, there’s a limited pool of customers an ISP can reach. Once you reach a high enough level of market saturation, you’re going to need a new way to grow.
Support calls are a surprisingly good place for this because to upsell a customer effectively, they have to recognize a pain point that the upsell will solve. And there’s no time that’s clearer than when they’re calling in with a problem.
Let’s look at some of the most common pain point situations—and how your team can turn them into upsell opportunities.
The problem: They don’t have enough bandwidth for their devices.
It’s a common misconception among home internet consumers that if they’re paying for 100-Mb service, that speed is going to go to each and every device they have. They don’t often realize that it’s a flat-rate resource that gets divided up among all the devices they have. And the more devices they have, the less resource each one gets.
That’s never an easy conversation to have, and can leave customers frustrated about not getting what they thought they were.
How to turn bandwidth woes into an upsell conversation
The trick is to show customers exactly where their bandwidth is going. Think of it as a leaky sink; unless they can see that it’s leaking, they’re just going to be surprised that they don’t have the water pressure they were expecting.
For example, with RouteThis, you can help customers run their own scans that show them what’s happening on their network—including how many devices are connected, and how much bandwidth they’re consuming. It can be a real eye-opener!
That also often illustrates to them that this is going to be a recurring problem unless they add more bandwidth. Because well, they’re not going to want to disconnect any of those devices.
The problem: Their devices keep disconnecting in one area of the house.
Ah, yes. The one room of the house that’s haunted by WiFi disconnects. Most customers will either assume there’s a problem with the service coming into their home (i.e., it’s an outage), or they’ll assume it’s a problem with their router. In both cases, that merits a call to their ISP.
Most of the time, when one room in the house has constant issues with disconnects, it’s because that room is simply too far away from the router to get a good signal. To fix it, the customer needs to buy a network extender or two, or maybe invest in mesh pods.
Unfortunately, most customers won’t buy that when they hear it on the phone. How could you possibly know what their network and home look like?
How to turn one-room disconnects into an upsell conversation
Well, you could take the customer through the somewhat painful process of having them move closer to the router to see that their signal improves. Or, you could give them a simpler visual instead.
For example, RouteThis can help you illustrate to the customer that it’s a problem with the signal being received, not the signal being sent. When the customer does a scan of their network, it can show them a list of every device, the signal strength those devices are receiving, and whether their router is operating as expected.