Recently I made a fairly expensive purchase for some lens filters. I had high expectations for it as it was rather pricey. However, the company seemed to be reputable and in this case I considered it an investment where I wanted quality that would last. Unfortunately the product didn’t live up to my expectation where it wasn’t as user friendly as anticipated and large base of people who purchased the item as well agreed. Not too long after the company announced a new product line that would be released which would solve the issues. The problem of course is what does that mean for the customers that already spent money?
Well the company announced that they would allow people to return their old product to get the new ones instead. So, that was good in many ways as the company acknowledged the complaints and was willing to try and fix it. So today I followed the instructions to request for the better product. Interestingly enough I was also informed that on top of getting the new product I could keep the old one too since returning it would probably cost more in shipping and handling.
What this situation demonstrated to me is how it could have gone so wrong PR wise if the company just had more of a “too bad” attitude and make everyone purchase new products straight up. At the same time just allowing me to keep the existing set of products too made it feel like they really were trying to think of it from the customer’s end. That is such an important thing when it comes to trying to be a “premium” brand company I feel.
It shows too that as a customer one is generally very understandable as long as a company is transparent about an issue and actively tries to fix it. Because like here I am aware that they must be losing money doing this. But many times if you make an error it’s better to take the loss than trying to just break even if you truly value people to be repeat customers of sort.