I’m an idiot. I am sitting in Sydney airport in the middle of a three hour wait for my flight. If I were to wait for the flight that I originally booked, I would be waiting for another six months. Somehow, I booked my return flight for 14 July instead of 14 January. Why? Because I’m an idiot.
This post, however, is not about my inability to do basic chores. Rather, this incident brings up one of the fundamental aspects of customer service: How do you handle a situation when it doesn’t go according to plan. In this case the customer screwed up. In many other cases, the customer received the wrong size/item in the mail. The most common problem, of course, are returns where the customer got what she ordered but, for whatever reason, she is just not satisfied. How your business handles these problems can have a long-lasting effect on the health of your business.
LL Bean, an American online and catalogue retailer, will take back any item at any time, no questions asked, and will also pay for the postage. They have been doing this for years and over the past decades have built up an extremely loyal and passionate customer base. There are many documented cases of a customer sending back a piece of clothing that has worn out after years of use and getting a new item by return post. No questions asked.
Nordstrom, an upscale department store in the US, allows people to return goods at any time, with or without a receipt. There are many stories going around of people who buy a dress, wear it to a function, and then return it for a full refund.
LL Bean and Nordstrom know they are being taken for a ride by many people. But what makes them great businesses is that they structure their organisation and their policies around treating their customers with respect. They accept the feral ones as a cost of doing good business with the other 98% of life.
Human nature is such that there will always be people who will take advantage of any situation that they can. However, these are the exceptions and not the rule. By applying the Golden Rule and setting up policies and procedures that are not designed solely to protect the integrity of the business model, LL Bean and Nordstrom build customer relationships that last. People choose to buy with them because they know that they are dealing with good people trying to do the right thing. Whatever it costs them in the short run is more than made up over the long term.
In my case, the Qantas staff were great. They told me that this happens all the time (which took away some, not all, of my embarrassment), that they would be able to sort something out (which took away my anxiety about having to spend six months in Sydney) and to give them just a minute (which meant that my problem would soon be over). The Qantas people were empowered to do the right thing – whatever ‘right’ meant at the time – and had the intelligence and discretion to settle the matter in a way that suited all parties. In this instance, I got on the flight after the one I thought I had booked.
Qantas is not necessarily the cheapest option when I fly, but as far as I’m concerned they are the only one. Until, or unless, they screw me over somewhere down the line. But that’s a story for another post.