There are several reasons which many business including our own do not provide prices over the phone. A person may say “It could be a competitor checking your prices”, but this is not the main reason.
Here are the top reasons why various businesses don’t provide over the phone pricing.
Possibly the most common reason is that standing by the phone talking to people is very time consuming, especially when you have customers at the shop or you have a repair in progress. From our research we have noticed a vast majority of callers never come in even when a price on the phone was given. Before opening my own shop I used to work for another repair shop and we would get 30 or more calls a day, and on average, maybe one or two of them would come in, and sometimes, none of them would come in at all. But beyond that, numerous studies show that overall, only a small percentage of callers actually go to a location after calling. People who call usually just check prices and go to whichever store has the cheapest price. If the place you work at isn’t known for having the cheapest prices, you’re not going to get those sales anyway.
I then used to work in an electrical parts center and although we did provide prices to customers over the phone, we did not provide wholesale prices to customers unless they had a wholesale account because the company did not want the public to know our wholesale prices and get the wrong idea. Additionally, if a customer calls asking for pricing on a large number of parts, we have to ask a supervisor because we had a daily call quota, and it would take an hour or more to find a bunch of parts, which kills the individual employee’s call volume for the day.
I also used to work at a place where the owner claimed the prices were the lowest in town, but they were actually the highest. I suspect he didn’t want us to give a price because he knew he wasn’t really offering the best price. A good salesman can convince a large percentage of customers to buy something, even if it’s not the lowest price, but only if that customer is in the store. Personally I didn’t like that business model.
My main concern is the customer experience and not giving false expectations. I do have many of our prices on the website where customers are free to look but we also have studied electronic repair extensively so we stand by our quality of repair. I always feel that I don’t wanna give my customers a headache coming back and forth nothing having a repair done correctly. Even after the repair is completed and we have done extensive testing, we also make an effort to clean the device very well making it as good as factory refurbished, so how can I be the cheapest repair in town when I offer quality. Giving a diagnosis over the phone is also virtually impossible sometimes and sometimes even the problem itself looks clear as day to the customer but we can only truly see what it is in person.
This is model of how we do our business and I do know some customers can get offended and they may even think that we don’t care about taking the time to help them but that isn’t the case we really strive for great customer service and customer experience but we know that we can not always please the world and some may fall under the cracks. Also we are an experience based company and the best experience we give to someone as just a number on a phone call isn’t the best representation of who we are so we encourage people to check out our YouTube channel check us out on social media and the site.
