When Customer Experience Fails the People Who Need It Most
This post is inspired by an ongoing experience shared by Dave Ballesteros, Founder & CEO of Flowstone Group. His mother's story shows what happens when a sales process fails the people who trust it most.
When you hear the word "dealership," what comes to mind? Official? Reputable? New?
Buying a new car isn't cheap. But that higher price tag is supposed to buy something back: variety, accessible financing, and protection from lemons. Most of all, it should buy confidence that the brand stands behind what it sells.
So, what happens when the official source is the one taking advantage of you?
Picture an 85-year-old woman whose minivan finally gave out. She did her research, walked into a reputable dealership, and trusted them to take care of her. It wasn't until the papers were signed and the car was off the lot that her family discovered she'd been oversold on nearly everything.
Upselling vs. Overselling
Done right, upselling isn't a scam. The customer gets something they'll use, the business earns a fair margin, and everyone walks away fine. Overselling is different. It's selling something the customer has already told you they don't need.
She told them she drives about 6,000 miles a year. Her new car already came with a 60,000-mile warranty, free and standard. At her pace, that covers about ten years. Here's what the finance office sold her anyway:
She walked out with the car she came for, plus a 72-month loan carrying nearly $7,000 in extras, financed at interest for six years.
Should we still use the word "reputable" for brands we're supposed to trust?
This Isn't One Bad Day at One Dealership
It would be easy to call this an isolated incident, but overselling is what happens when sales targets matter more than the customer in front of you. One of the largest banks in the U.S. learned that the hard way.
For years, the bank's branches ran on aggressive cross-selling goals. Managers had daily sales quotas, and shortfalls rolled over into the next day's targets. Personal bankers could earn bonuses worth 15 to 20% of their salary. Employees later said they feared being penalized if they missed their numbers.
The result:
Up to 3.5 million potentially unauthorized customer accounts
About 5,300 employees fired over sales practice violations across five years
$185 million paid in 2016 to settle claims from regulators and the City and County of Los Angeles
A federal regulator capped the bank's growth until it could prove it had fixed its oversight
The bank's stated vision was to "satisfy our customers' needs." The incentive system said something else, and the incentive system won.
The lesson carries over to any business that sells: when the process rewards volume and never asks whether the customer needs what they're buying, overselling becomes the system rather than an exception.
When the Process Becomes the Problem
To the dealership's credit, when her son caught the add-ons, they let her cancel all three. You'd think the story ends with that cancellation in late June. It didn't..
Timelines shouldn't shift. A good process gives one accurate window and updates you if it changes. Hers moved on its own: 30 days, then 60. Two months in, still nothing.
Confirmed should mean confirmed. She got an email saying her payment went through. It hadn't, and nobody told her.
A failed payment should reach you. A voicemail, a text, an email, anything. She got two silent calls and nothing else.
You shouldn't have to catch your own company's mistake. The only reason anyone noticed was her son logging in to check.
No single person caused this. It's a process built with zero backup for a customer who doesn't audit her account every week. For an 85-year-old managing this on her own, that's a direct path to a missed payment, a damaged credit score, and collections, all for money she never owed.
The Real Cost
Nobody set out to target an elderly customer. This was an ordinary sales incentive running exactly as designed, with no checkpoint for someone who might not catch the math, answer an unfamiliar 800 number, or know to ask for a rewritten loan instead of waiting on a "credit that's coming."
Multiply that by the volume a dealership, a bank, or any sales-driven business handles in a year, and it stops being an anecdote. It becomes exposure. Every step is a customer experience decision: what gets disclosed, what gets automated, who gets a phone call and who gets a form letter, and whether a cancellation is processed the same day or "whenever accounting gets to it."
The businesses that get this right won't fix it with a better disclosure form. They'll fix it by asking, at every step: what does this process do to the customer who can't call back a third time and ask for a supervisor? Design for that person, and the experience gets better for everyone.
Why This Matters to Us
At Flowstone Group, this story hits close to home, and not only because it's personal. It's the exact problem we were built to solve.
We're vendor-agnostic. We don't earn more by pushing a bigger package, a preferred vendor, or hardware you'll never use. We start with what your business actually needs, find the right-fit technology, and stay in your corner through implementation and beyond.
The right recommendation isn't always the biggest one. Sometimes it's telling you that you're already covered.
Source: Brian Tayan, "Closer Look" series, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Corporate Governance Research Initiative, January 2019.
Cartoons: Shep Hyken, Customer Service Expert and Business Speaker
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