Break the Rules — not guitars!

Seriously?

The Internet is a great source of information, whether it’s wikipedia (I’d hate to be trying to sell encyclopedias door-to-door these days!) or amazon.com product reviews. The wealth and democratization of information is a huge amazing part of why I love the Internet so much as a consumer of the web and of ‘stuff’ in general.

I can’t remember the last purchase I made that was over fifty dollars that I didn’t do web research first to help me decide. If I couldn’t find specific product information I would use brand information. Consumer Reports is a great source of information as well.

That being said, many reviews or reviewers fall into two categories, the five-star evangelists lobbying FOR a product, and the 1 star haters who got burned by either a bad product, bad company, or bad customer experience. Now, just a star rating isn’t all I go by. I once read a review of a refrigerator that down-graded the fridge, knocking it down 2 stars because the ice-maker didn’t have a light in it. It didn’t say it did. If I buy a car and then complain that it doesn’t have 4 wheel drive that’s my fault, not the car’s. So some reviews are done by people who don’t pay attention to what they’re buying and then get mad when they made assumptions before they made their purchase. Remember all that information out there on the Internet? Use it before you make the purchase, not after.

United really dropped the ball when they dropped this guy’s guitar and then didn’t try and fix it. When I first took over this job with the new area I was fielding at least two calls a month from angry customers upset about something we’d done to them or not done for them. I had a meeting with my managers and explained to them that they were to take as their first rule to make the customer happy. If they had to break a rule to do that then do it but I wanted those angry customer calls to come down. If it meant we had to exchange an item that our policy said we didn’t exchange? Fine, exchange it then throw away the old one. Our profit margin can take one lost product it can’t take all the lost customers we would have when they left angry and told anybody who would listen.

There are customers out there who will take advantage of that situation. I fire them. Yep. You heard it. If they are abusing my good nature I tell them myself that we’re just too bad at our job to help them any more and they deserve better than us and while I’d love to take their money it would keep me up nights to continue to give them the horrible service we’ve done and I’m terribly sorry and wish them the best of luck across the street at Billy-Joe-Bob’s Widget Emporium which according to them has better selection, value, and service and we’ll miss them dearly but please… never come here again, we don’t deserve their money.

Yep. That’s right. I fire the customer who abuses my liberal customer service policies. The thing is… when I break those rules and make the customer happy — THOSE customers come back. THOSE customers don’t try to go higher than me (there isn’t much higher than me so they used to just go to the main office operator and then she’d get me to get in touch with them. I’m pretty high in the food chain ’round these parts.). So, the odds of me getting in trouble for making the customer happy and getting them to come back are almost zero. The upshot is that while the economy and my 401k are not doing so splendidly these stores are continuing to see growth store to store over last year. I attribute it to better customer service than they were used to getting.

Any company that values their policies over their customers had better be able to pay their bills with those policies once the customers get tired of their abuse… unless they’re AT&T and the iphone users are too addicted to leave them. Monopolies don’t need good customer service so if you’re the only game in town… you can ignore this post. United isn’t though… they shouldn’t have told their customer to get over it.

United, as shown in this song… believed their rules were more important than their customer. They were wrong… to the tune of around 180 Million dollars lost to shareholders according to this article.

PS: When it comes to liberal exchange policies though… I think Scott Adams got the best one I’ve heard of in his e-mail box.

The Break the Rules — not guitars! by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.