How far should a company go to keep frustrated customer happy?

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.

Reconsidering rudeness on a subway car

In early January, I wrote about Marie, a subway rider in the Northeast, who witnessed a seated young woman talking on her cellphone refuse to move her bags from a seat after a young man asked her to so he could sit. The young woman pointed to several empty seats on the train.

Marie found the young woman's behavior rude and wondered if she should have said something. Since the situation got resolved without much fuss, I told Marie that she had no obligation to intercede, but that the right thing when riding a subway is to only take up one seat.

Readers from California, Canada, North Carolina, Ohio, and loads of locales in between immediately took issue and asked me to reconsider my response.

"It's a shame you didn't encourage her to say something to the rude subway rider," wrote G.K. "You essentially were advising her to condone the behavior. If Marie and five other subway riders would have spoken up and criticized the hogger's behavior, perhaps she would have been forced to acknowledge her behavior as rude and behaved differently next time."

But most readers took issue with the suggestion that the young woman was being rude by placing her bag on an empty seat and telling the young man to sit elsewhere.

"Are you out of your mind?" asks N.C. "Plenty of empty seats and a man wants to sit right next to his woman? Maybe she didn't want to be harassed."

"His behavior sounds totally creepy to me," wrote H.D.

E.S. asked that I reconsider in light of "the reality of gender inequalities, personal safety, personal space, and the lack of any pragmatic harm in placing personal possessions adjacent to oneself, space permitting."

While I still believe that Marie did the right thing by not interceding, and that she had no obligation to call out the young woman if she believed she was being rude, those readers who suggested that perhaps there was something "creepy" about a young man avoiding empty seats on and aiming right for the one with the young woman's bag raised good points.

No one riding on public transportation should be asked to put herself in an unsafe situation. If the young man was sidling up to the young woman on the cellphone to flirt with her or to harass her, she had every reason to hold her ground. Marie doesn't believe that this was the case, but neither Marie nor I nor anyone else can know how vulnerable the young woman felt at that moment.

The right thing, of course, is always to avoid potential harmful situations. If the young woman on the train believed she was doing this, then she had every right to ask the young man to sit elsewhere.

As soon as the train filled up with passengers and seats became scarcer, the right thing would be for her to remove her bag from the seat to allow other passengers to sit, even if that meant they might be sitting right next to her. Sometimes having to sit next to a stranger on a crowded train is an inherent risk of public transportation. 

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.

Should employees be allowed to work from home during blizzards?

Massachusetts had a snowstorm a few weeks back -- an occurrence that is likely to repeat itself regularly over the next several weeks. A reader from Massachusetts asks if it is right for an employer to make employees "take unnecessary risks" by driving to work after the governor asked residents to stay off the roads.

The reader works for a health care organization where employees who interact with patients must be in the office to be able to do their jobs. But the reader doesn't interact with any patients and can easily log on to her company's server so she can do her job from home.

But when she emailed her boss to let him know she'd be working from home to avoid being on the roads during the snowstorm, he told her that that would be unfair to the employees who had to show up to work on site. She would have to take a vacation day if she didn't come in.

The reader has colleagues with whom she works who regularly have received dispensation to work from home. "We communicate easily and as needed," she writes.

Other colleagues who have approached the human resources department with similar requests to work from home during extreme weather conditions in the past have had no luck.

"It just boggles my mind that in 2016, I'm working for a company, with a boss, who doesn't allow us to work at home during extreme weather conditions," she writes. "They'd rather we risk our lives or take a day off."

There are a few questions at play here. One is whether it's OK for a boss to insist on particular employees physically showing up to work even when the weather is miserable and they don't need to be on site to get their work done. Unless the reader had an agreement with her boss that she could occasionally work from home, particularly on snowy days, then the boss is within his rights to insist that she show up physically to work.

But another question is whether it makes sense for the boss to be rigid about this requirement, particularly if the state's governor has asked "non-essential" employees to stay off the roads if possible. In such situations, it's not unusual for companies to allow nonessential employees to stay home while others go to work.

That it wouldn't be "fair" to the essential employees if the nonessential employees worked from home seems a red herring. What the boss really is saying, and has every right to, is that he wants everyone to show up to work regardless of the weather. If they don't, then he doesn't want to credit them for a work day.

The right thing would have been for the employee to get clear on her ability to work from home when she accepted the job. Is it wise for the boss to insist on employees who don't need to be on the roads when more drivers could make road conditions more hazardous, especially when those employees could still put in a full day's work from home? No, but he has the right to do so. There are times when bosses get to where they are without wisdom playing into how they got there. 

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.