Superior service, happy customers and unpaid evangelists

Go the extra mile – but don’t count your chickens until they’ve crossed the finishing line

A couple of weeks ago, my favourite headphones went on the blink. To be honest, I wasn’t really that surprised. They were the second pair of that particular make and model I’d bought, and they replaced the first pair, which had failed in exactly the same way. The wire leading into the right one seemed to come loose, and I had to wiggle it to get the sound back. The whole thing was a sealed unit, so there was no way I could fix it without breaking it – which was less than ideal. So when it happened a second time, I knew there was nothing to do but buy a third pair. Am I a glutton for punishment, I hear you ask? Well no, but I do like headphones that have rich, deep sound, rather than the thin, reedy strains you get from so many. And these ones ticked the rich and deep box. But they were also flawed, of course. So I was (a) loyal to the brand and (b) simultaneously disappointed by it. The first time round, I was willing to write it off as one of those things. And unusually, quality came with a low price tag – in this case, I had quite a bit of change out of £20. So forking out for a second pair was no great sacrifice. But a third pair? Well that began to rankle.

Until deaf do us part

I did a Google search, and saw that I wasn’t alone. It was a known issue/undocumented feature that many people had experienced. But I also found out that there was a lifetime guarantee for these headphones – in the US, at least, according to a forum poster. With my characteristic cynicism, I expected this wouldn’t be extended to the rest of the world. But it was. And there was a distributor in the UK. My hard-baked cynicism took a further knock when I phoned them up. “Oh yes,” said the helpful, friendly, smiley (I could hear it) chap I spoke to, “the lifetime guarantee. Yes, we do that here too. I’ll send you an email with all the details.” And he did – but that’s when he made a fatal mistake. If you’re going to over-promise, then you need to… over-deliver, of course. In his email, he said, ‘when we receive the headphones we will normally repair and send them back on the same day’. Wow, I thought. Now that’s what I call service. So I popped the headphones in the post, choosing recorded delivery so I could track their progress online. That was a Tuesday. They arrived at the distributor on Wednesday. So I got them back on Thursday, right? No. Not on Thursday, or Friday, or Saturday, or Monday. They arrived on Tuesday, a whole week after I sent them. Now if you’re a marketing Martian, that’s pretty good. These Earthlings seem clued up, on the whole. (Well apart from that Curiosity probe, which will never find us, because it’s looking in the wrong place.) But if you’re me, and the bar of your expectations has been set high, you’re disappointed. It’s all a question of the promise versus the reality.

Analyse this

OK, OK. Let’s cut to the chase here, and as my therapist once said to me, find something positive to focus on, however small, and hold on to it. So what positive takeaways are there in this experience? What marketing lessons can we learn?

Lifetime guarantees are a great idea. They inspire confidence in customers, show an unshakeable belief in your products, and make you look like a can-do company. And they cost next to nothing, if you have reliable gear.
If you have a great idea, shout it from the rooftops. This one was hidden deep in cyberspace, and I stumbled upon it by chance. If the first pair had mentioned the guarantee, I wouldn’t have bought the second pair. But it didn’t.
Make sure everybody internally is up to speed. In this case, they were faultless. And twice over, since the company I dealt with was an international distributor, not the manufacturer.
You don’t always need to set yourself a deadline. Doing so can put you under pressure and set you up for failure. What if there’s an unforeseen problem? What if the fault takes longer to fix? What if you’re unexpectedly snowed under with other work? Instead of a deadline, set yourself a goal: fixing the problem and keeping the customer informed. It beats deadlines hands down.
People are creatures of habit and want to stick with you. They don’t like change, which means they don’t swap brands unless they really, really have to. It’s a wrench, and once they’re gone, they’re unlikely to come back. So make it easy for them to stay.

And lastly, of course, a happy customer is a repeat customer. It’s much easier to sell to somebody who’s bought from you before. Somebody like me. With my confidence restored in my favourite brand of headphones, I’m now looking at buying a smaller, more portable model for my travels. And I’m telling everybody I can about their rich, deep, satisfying sound, and zero-risk buying choice (aka lifetime guarantee). So I’m a happy customer, and an unpaid evangelist. And that’s marketing manna for any company.

Kevin Marketing.