The part where they didn’t do it right is easy to point the finger and is why I sort of glossed over it, but the part where the customer can be at fault too was something I wanted to point out. I’ve been in the situation where the first I’ve ever heard of a problem from a customer is when they’re saying “… and I’ll never come here again because of …” and I’m like, if they’d told me sooner it would have been fixed.

People who save things up until they’re at that point are perennial victims and are worse for business than a “raving fan” is good for business. These are also people who tend to never have a good meal at a restaurant, good hotel room at a hotel, or a good experience buying a car. And always because they don’t tell the ppl something went wrong, but they tell everybody else who will listen. That is unfair to the business as if you don’t give us a chance to fix it how are we supposed to know it needs fixing? If we return to your table and ask if everything’s OK and you say “Yes.” How are we to know you asked for Ranch dressing but got French? If you say it’s OK to us, but then tell everybody else “They got the dressing wrong and I knew from then on that nothing was going to be right… can’t even get the salad course right. Terrible help there, probably badly trained, and you know if you complain they spit in your food! What else could I do but eat it?”

Yeah, the store dropped the ball, but the customer definitely does too sometimes.

I’m assuming they delivered and installed the stove. If they had taken the initiative to send out a brief postage paid postcard to their customers they probably would have gotten a response and could’ve fixed the problem while the stove was still under the manufacturer warranty.

The postcard is non-confrontational. Some people are intimidated when complaining to a real person. And it’s probably not too common to get one from a satisfied customer, but when people feel they’ve been screwed or mistreated, they’ll take any opportunity to bitch about to someone who cares and can make amends.

It’s not like this is a revolutionary idea. Companies have been doing this for decades on big ticket sales. And nowerdays companies can move the whole thing to email and save the few bucks they were spending on postage. You can’t blame a customer for not bringing their dissatisfaction to your attention when you made no effort to follow up after the sale. Companies that do this and resolve the problem are the companies that get, and deserve, the good word of mouth press, and they usually get a lot more out of an initially unsatisfactory situation they took the initiative and resolved than one where everything went perfect the first time around.