When Customer Loyalty is Disrespected

I’d like to tell you a story… A horror story of sorts.

It’s a story about a young woman with a laptop that needed fixing. The laptop was under warranty, and she took it to her local computer store to get it repaired. At this point in the story, it’s worth mentioning that the girl whose laptop is broken also happens to be deaf and bed-bound due to reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Her computer is her only connection to the outside world. In fact, it is her world.

The technicians at the store tell the girl’s mother that the computer must be sent out for repair. Finally, after one whole month, the computer arrives back at the store. The employees call the girl’s mother and tell her that they need the computer’s battery and a/c cord, because they can’t get it to stay on so they can put “restorative information” on it.

After they receive the cord, they call her later and tell her they “need the activation key number” for the computer. She asks them where she can find that and they tell her, wait for it, on the side of the computer. For those of you keeping score at home, the store is still in possession of the computer. They then have her call the computer’s manufacturer to get a new activation number, but without the computer or any information, which the store has, she’s out of luck. The store then tells her that without the activation number, the computer must be sent back to the factory to be repaired.

Now bear in mind that throughout this entire ordeal, the girl who relies on this computer for interaction with the world is stuck in bed with nothing. No window on the world or anything other than a television.

While the computer is out at the factory, again, the store calls to inform the mother that the a/c adapter they sent in had to be repaired, and would now cost $170 to fix. The mother was confused, as she had purchased the extended warranty for the products, and the a/c adapter wasn’t broken when she gave it to them. The store then politely informed her that the warranty had run out while they had the computer in their possession, which was over a month at this point. The a/c adapter was working fine when they sent it in, and now they were going to charge her $170 to fix it?

The bigger issue here is that the store gave the family the run around, kept the computer for much longer than was necessary due to their ignorance, and then proceeded to tell the family they couldn’t have it back until they paid all repair costs, since it was now out of warranty.

This is ridiculous, and you’ll be happy to know that after sharing the whole experience on the Internet, the girl ended up getting a brand-new computer as the company’s way of saying they were sorry. That’s good customer service and that’s how you build customer loyalty, that one part right there at the end of this story. You take care of your customer – plain and simple. There shouldn’t have to be a customer loyalty program operating for that to take place, but it’s often times necessary. With a loyalty program, there would be a plan in place for these types of issues. As a result, a successful outcome can potentially lead to positive word of mouth or written reviews of your company. That leads to the opportunity for more business and brand loyalty.