I was reading an article from Business Week Report February 2009 edition this weekend and I found an interesting subject which I value most for my business as well as an IT consultant. The editor put several cases in which top notch executives’ experiences as a guide for his article and use them to explain that even in recession time, people will go out of their way to provide excellent services even to the point that losing profits is acceptable. I found it a little bizarre.
As a regular/frequent consumer I often buy things that I can use to improve my living standards but not to break my back at the end of the month to find an extra part time or temp job to pay my bills. Often in times, I am dissatisfy with the quality of the item I purchases and usually I would sell it at a lower price on eBay or Amazon. I would go through my usual approach: set the price of the item about $2 to $5 dollar less than the purchase value and see if I get any “watchers”. Then close to the end of the auction I would monitor and if there is no bidder I would lower it to the acceptable price in order to draw one bidder. This process would save me at least the cost of spending time on the phone with the online retailer like newegg.com or buy.com and get rid of the unwanted item faster than you think. This is because I have been through a trauma with customer services with a horrible RMA department and Paypal customer services.
Accuracy would prevent me for buying these unwanted junkies and prevent me to shop at local retailers, but this is not the case for discussion today. Some customer services, like newegg.com, like to tell you that you have to contact the manufacturer automated phone system in order. What I have in mind is for retailer to provide a detail description along with the shipment to explain what you need to do if you have a change of heart or product malfunction. This should be set as the standard front line of customer services rather than waiting for consumers to call and ask them to wait because they spent their quality evening being put on hold in hope to return the product.
My second suggestion is exchange. If the customer is not satisfied with the product and it is unopened, they should have the rights to exchange it with something else within a period of time. I understand that for smaller retailers will be difficult to accommodate such ridiculous request, however for larger retailers who are still maintaining supports from a good line of creditors, shouldn’t you start to improve and challenge competitors to become the best? Like Barnes and Noble which I worked at, customer can take it back to the store after 14 days of purchase for full refund, but this would be too generous and miracles to be happening for online retailers. B&N also imply a policy for returns with receipts within 30 days of unopened items. Now this is what I want to see when I shop online.
To prevent abuses, online stores can imply a policy that only after the given items are received the consumer then will be ask to prompt their answers to a selective questions online, ask them to explain and give review of their change of minds before issuing exchanges or refunds. Talking about reviews based upon people who purchased the items, we should integrated customer services to an invisible level where internet can serve for all purposes, not only for online taking credit card numbers or Paypal accounts.
