Should a company do whatever's reasonably possible to
keep a frustrated customer happy?
A reader -- let's call him Max -- purchased a new laptop
computer last September. The company gave him a $50 gift card that he could use
to buy any accessory from the manufacturer's website.
Max set up his new laptop.
After two or three weeks, he noticed that while his
wireless connection worked fine when he was outside of his home, it regularly
disconnected when he used his new laptop at home. None of the other equipment
hooked up to his home's wireless router -- his wife's laptop, their cellphones
-- had trouble staying connected to the wireless signal.
Max called the manufacturer's technical support line. The
technician walked Max through several diagnostics and ended up staying on the
phone more than an hour. All worked fine for a day, but then the dropped
wireless signal resumed. Again, Max called support. Again, he spent several
more hours on the phone.
"Could it be my router?" Max asked the
technician. He was advised that before he started replacing any additional
hardware, they should figure out if the problem had anything to do with his new
laptop.
The problem persisted and Max spent several more hours on
the phone. He again asked if he should buy a new router. He was told to hold
off since the manufacturer was going to send a replacement wireless card.
A local technician installed the new card and checked out
Max's laptop. After it seemed to work, he left Max's house. Before the end of
the day, the dropped signal problem resumed.
Max finally decided to purchase a new wireless router
hoping that might solve the issue. When he went to apply the $50 gift card to
his online purchase, he was alerted that it had expired.
Several calls to the manufacturer explaining that he only
waited to purchase the router because the manufacturer advised him to wait were
met with little sympathy. "There's nothing we can do," he was told.
Rather than spend more hours on the telephone, Max purchased the router, set it
up, and has had no problems with his wireless connection since.
Should the company have honored the gift card, given that
its representatives had advised Max to hold off buying the router?
While it would have been a minor cost to keep a
frustrated customer happy, the company had no ethical obligation to honor the
expired gift card. The right thing would have been for Max to let the
technician know about the gift card and the expiration date right from the
start in case that might have influenced his advice to purchase a new router.
Max didn't do that, so the cost of the router is on him.
The manufacturer may have been in the right to refuse the
gift card, but in the process it lost a long-time customer who had spent
thousands on at least a dozen computers from it over the years. Max is
determined to purchase his next laptop someplace else -- and he'll probably
update his router then too.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin
(c) 2015 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
1 comment:
Boy did the company mess up.
First, he received a gift card and did not use it in time. So what! An argument would be his purchase did not work so he could not. Yes he could have mentioned it but his problem was more important at the time than the certificate. He probably did not think about it or may not have known the expiration issue.
Now, he is a lost customer. So they saved $ 50 which he planned to use in their store, big deal.
Big companies spend millions to get people in, more millions to keep customers happy, and they blew it on a technicality.
As an example, I went to a hardware chain to buy something where the discount deal had changed and I no longer qualified. I thought it in bad taste that the change was not mentioned to the customers like myself who receive regular mailings and it could have easily been added in text and cost them nothing. The clerk understood and allowed it "on good faith". A simple gesture for nearly no cost which keeps me coming. A very similar technicality to the router issue.
Alan Owseichik
Greenfield, Ma.
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