When I was in university I worked summers in an Italian restaurant, Campo Marina, in my hometown. Osoyoos is a tourist town. The population is around 3500 but would double in the summers when families would flock to Canada’s warmest freshwater lake. The restaurant in the summers was only open for dinners starting at five o’clock and by six o’clock would have at least a one hour wait for a table. Unless you had a reservation and even then it was not uncommon to wait a few minutes.
Except for locals.
Mike, the owner, always kept one table free for locals. It didn’t matter how busy it was, or how long the line; regular customers got to jump the queue. I asked Mike one night why he did that. He explained that regular, loyal customers were his bread and butter. In the winter, when the tourists had all left, these people were what kept the restaurant running. That treating existing customers as special just made good business sense.
Sure he could have flipped that empty table for a couple hundred dollars a night but those regulars who got special treatment would spend thousands in the off season. Many would come in once a week for dinner. I have never forgotten that lesson.
It baffles me why some companies ignore existing customers and only focus on acquiring new customers. Rogers telecom in Canada was guilty of this. When my cellphone contract was up, they wouldn’t give me the going rate saying that offer was only for new customers. If I wanted to remain with them, I would need to close that account (and lose the phone number) and sign up again. Needless to say I told them to stuff it and left. Thankfully now Canadians get to keep their numbers.
I wrote previously of my transactions with Norton Utilities and the need to switch to something else. I also wrote about the price of auto-renewing versus the online offer for new customers.
Now it has happened to me again. Bitdefender auto-renewed my subscription despite me disabling it. When I contacted them to cancel the transaction, their retention team sent me an email offering me a partial refund to remain for another year, or extending my subscription for three years without any refund. Neither offer matched the online price and the implication was getting a full refund was not on the table. In addition, they implied that I had made a mistake and not turned off auto-renew (see screenshot above) and that they’d sent me an email about the renewal which they had not.
I continued to protest and got a full refund but the service charges from my bank still ended up costing me $5.91 CAD. In the grand scheme of things it’s not a big deal but the lack of respect and willingness to accept responsibility baffles me.
I just don’t get it.
It is so easy to make customers happy. I have no idea why companies fuck that up for short term gain. Well, actually I guess I do. Sure, if they had pushed it (and I didn’t have the screenshots) they might have gotten one more year out of me at a higher rate. But what is that compared to a lifetime of service. I will always own a computer (if not several) and I will always need anti-virus. They were my solution to that problem. The emphasis on “were”.
When I worked at Opus Art Supplies I worked for a year in the phone sales department. We’d been given the autonomy to do whatever we felt was reasonable to keep a customer happy. One time, someone was sent the wrong colour tube of paint. I could see she spent a fair amount of money with us. I told her to keep it as an apology and that I would courier the correct colour today and she’d have it by the next day. What did it cost? A tube of paint and a slightly more expensive shipping option. Since I was going to have to send the correct colour anyway and we’d have to pay for the return which in reality probably cost more than the wrong tube of paint wholesaled for.
Bitdefender refused to refund the charges, claiming they couldn’t refund more than they already had but honestly that’s bullshit. They could have sent an e-transfer or a cheque. They simply didn’t care. Their staff tried to offer various “deals” on services but once the reputational damage has been done, it’s very difficult to get it back. And why would I continue to do business and spend more money, even if it was a “discount” with a company that screwed me over?
The lesson I learned from Mike at Campo Marina was “Make new customers, but keep the old; Those ones are silver, but these ones are gold.”