When you’re casting about for ways to boost customer service, don’tneglect product or service guarantees. Guarantees are one of themost powerful marketing statements you can make, especially for newcompanies.
While helping to build customer loyalty, guarantees also lead toexcellent feedback. Customers demanding guarantee payouts pointdirectly to weaknesses in the system. And while you may have to payto make things right for disgruntled customers, in return, you’llbe purchasing invaluable information about where things are goingwrong.
Ideally, a good guarantee is unconditional, easy to understand,meaningful, easy to invoke, and quick to pay off. As an example,look at the guarantee offered by cataloger Lands’ End, which saysits products are “Guaranteed. Period.” Additional words in theguarantee advise buyers that this means they can return anything atany time for any reason. That information is very comforting to acustomer.
A meaningful guarantee has to really repay a customer for thetrouble your product or service caused. Even a 100-percent refundmay not do that if the cost of the product is small compared to theinconvenience, for instance, when a leaky ballpoint pen ruins anexpensive suit.
Before you decide whether your guarantee should be unconditionalor specific, money-back or more, ask your customers what’simportant to them. Xerox Corp. once considered offering buyers ofits office copiers a 90-day, unconditional, money-back guarantee.It sounded great until Xerox asked customers what they wanted. Mostcorporate purchasing agents said they didn’t want the moneyback–that would just make them look like they’d made a mistakebuying a Xerox. What they really wanted was a guarantee of areplacement if any problem cropped up. So Xerox crafted a guaranteeto replace any copier that had a major service problem within threeyears of purchase.
