This post title may confuse you a little at first but let me make it clear exactly what I mean. If you own a company or businesses of your own and are just in the service industry field, there are certain ways to treat your customer and ways to not treat them. Likewise, as a customer there are certain ways to be treated and sometimes the customer doesn’t understand that they are being fleeced or taken advantage of and I want to shed some light on how a business and customer should conduct themselves to make the best of a potentially bad situation.
Business or company owners take heed. Do not treat your customer like a dollar sign. This means basically that you still need to pay attention to the customer service aspect and not only worry about making money from them. It seems the bigger a business gets the more they forget that the customer is entitled to be treated with respect. You can of course treat them like unethically and come off with a nasty demeanor but that person is not likely to ever come back. The other loss is that they will tell their friends how much they HATE your business. You by now know the “10 person rule” if not it basically states that an angry customer who goes away still feeling angry will tell at least 10 people how horrible you are and then those 10 tell 10 more etc and so on. Now how accurate is that? I have no idea but I wouldn’t want to take the chance.
REFUNDS: This is one of the most important ones. Honor your policies. If you say you will give a refund for up to 30 days make sure to give a requesting customer a refund. Even if that customer says they think the product sucks, that you suck or that they just didn’t understand them. The point is that you take care of them and turn a customer who could become potential upset into a customer that thanks you for giving them a timely refund. Trust me I’ve had customers who sounded hostile in the beginning because they didn’t think a course was for them but I quickly defused the situation by honoring my refund policy and taken care of their needs. Several customers have thanks me for that course of action and several sent their friends over who they believe would be interested in the course.
Don’t ask questions (unless you really don’t know why they’d refund) but just simply process the refund. If this is a customer who has returned something else previously you might ask them why they continue to buy and refund. If you determine that they are taking advantage of your system then donot allow them politely tell them to stop buying your products if they are going to keep returning them. Unless of course something was defective with their purchase.
Let’s look at refunds as if you’re the cusomer now. If something offers a refund policy you are entitled to that refund. If someone tries to tell you you can’t have a refund but yet they have a policy stating that they give refunds, press the issue. You deserve that respect. If you’re ordering online make sure you read their policy which should be on their sales page or somewhere that isn’t draped in fine print. If they have too much fine print and no refund policy, be wary.
As a Customer what not to do when asking for a refund. This one applies to mainly wanting a refund on online orders but can work in offline markets as well. The #1 thing not to do is assume that you’re getting fleeced until you’ve heard back from the mechant. Of course if it takes them 4 days to get back to you you might send them a reminder email and then take more agreesive action if they still haven’t gotten back to you within a resonable amount of time. Often times during late night hours online merchants will not have a support staff online. So give ample time for them to respond back to you or for the refund to be processed.
My comapny deals mainly with marketing my online teaching products that teach people how to make money using the internet and it’s only natural to have a small amount of refunds. In the past 2 years and with thousands of sales I’ve only had 2 refunds where the customer was irrate and both issues were things that we couldn’t control. One of the customers actually emailed me about 15 times in the middle of the night. Sure my support staff processed her refund first thing that they logged on the next day but she could have saved herself alot of time and just sent 1 email.
As a business owner make sure you are upfront and clear with your clients and customers don’t lie to them. The first time you lie to a customer and they figure you out, they aren’t coming back and the 10 person rule takes effect again.
Ok, Last thing I want to talk about is SUPPORT. This applies to online and offline businesses. There are times where support is needed and it doesn’t mean that your product whether informational or physical is bad. There are times where someone doesn’t understand your product or your product malfunctions and they will need help. The best thing to do is have a support staff whether it’s you, one other person or a team of people. However, make sure you take care of customer support issues in a timely fashion. What is a reasonable time? 24-48 hours tops. The customer already paid good money for your product support it and make them happy. If you can’t take care of their problem figure out a way to get it taken care of or simply offer a refund as a last resort. Often time don’t just jump to give them a refund and think that will fix the problem. Chances are that customer really wanted your product or they wouldn’t have bought it. Again if you’re the customer in this situation offer ample time for the merchant to respond and take care of the issue.
There is actually hundreds of things I could talk about in this post and maybe I will do a follow up post on this soon but for now follow the advice in here and keep your customers happy. Also customers make things even easier by following what I outline here and make sure that the merchant honors what they say they will honor in a resonableamount of time.