The Art of the Upsell
So the tax software we used to do our own taxes this year (I will not name it because I refuse to contribute further to their revenue stream, but I'm sure you can guess it anyway because afterall - how many tax software companies are there out there) offered a special "service" whereby you could submit your tax forms to a professional tax firm (for a fee) electronically via the software application (securely of course) to have them review it and provide you with an electronic report.
As I mentioned, we owe money, and our taxes were complicated this year, and I figured it couldn't hurt to have someone do a quick review to make sure we didn't make any mistakes or miss anything, and given the timing and the relatively low fee, thought this might be the most expeditious and cost effective means of doing just that.
So I paid the fee, and submitted the forms electronically, and waited for my report.
I got the report today. Let me give you the highlights.
1) the first part was most definitely "form letter" material - "Your tax return contains a lot of information about you... we have analyzed your return and have found the following profile... if any of the following statements are not true, you may need to make corrections to your tax return" and it proceeded to regurgitate a bunch of information back at us that I had filled out about us, our employment, our income sources, our deductions, etc. Basically the same stuff that the tax software asked us with answers in plain english. Duh - that was helpful and a good use of our money. Not.
2) The end of the report had an "overall assessment" section in which it stated "Based on the information you provided, your reviewer has identified significant problems in this return. Do not file this return until you have carefully reviewed all of the issues within this report and made the appropriate adjustments. You may want to consider purchasing the unlimited telephone consultation service described at the end of this report".
Ack! Significant problems! Oh my god! Panic! Panic! What to do? Oh wait - they're offering a solution (for a fee)! Must sign up for unlimited telephone service! Now!
Yeah. I wasn't born yesterday.
It isn't about the money they make from getting you to buy a "professional tax review and report". It's about the ADDITIONAL SERVICES they make you believe you need as a result of that report so they can suck more cash out of you. No way. I ain't buyin'.
On the plus side, the report did point out a few errors we had made - a couple of which I easily corrected on my own, and a big one that I didn't fully understand but that a friend of ours (THANKS CHRIS!!!) explained and helped us correct that ended up saving us a nice chunk of change! So the initial investment in the report was money well spent... but they still didn't suck me into their real upsell, which was the unlimited phone support :-) Still you gotta give them some kind of credit for having an approach that probably does actually generate a lot of business for them... the "put the fear of god (and the IRS) into you" upsell pitch for additional services.
Hey - that reminds me of the time when Rich, a friend of ours and my boss at the time, made me believe I was going to jail because I forgot to file my US taxes (Sorry Rich - you know I have to bring it up every year at this time... it is a great story ;-))...
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