Published on May 01, 2010 Building Customer Loyalty: When should you ignore your business policies?
Rules are there for a reason but when should you break them?
There are times when enforcing a rule can hurt your business more than it helps you. At times like this, not following your own defined rules can help your customer retention levels and build customer loyalty and referrals. This does not mean you should always ignore the rules or that customers are always right. But sometimes rules are rules to be broken.
A good example of this is your returns policy. Most ecommerce stores that accept returns (on top of their statutory requirements under the law) have a policy similar to the following: to return an item contact the store for a return authorisation number, send the item back, get it inspected and it will be replaced or a store credit issued.
But consider this: a long standing loyal customer who is very valuable to you, who has never returned anything after hundreds of sales, has purchased something for an event coming up in a few days and then contacts you to say it’s broken and needs a replacement. What should you do? Should you go through the whole process or bend the rules a bit? If you really trust a customer who has made a lot of sales in your store and is a regular repeat customer, bending the rules and sending out a replacement without waiting for the returns authorisation number or the item to come back could really build loyalty to you – you are saving them as they need that item for their event and if they followed the rules they wouldn’t even get it back to you in time let alone a replacement. If the item is of low financial value to you, you could even waive the return to base process and just trust the customer that they were telling you the truth and the item was broken.
This situation wouldn’t happen with every purchase but in this example, it could really help you.
Companies who are difficult and enforce rules for the sake of enforcing them are often written about in reviews – and in a negative way. They haven’t done anything wrong technically, they have followed their rules, but the level of flexibility and customer service ethic that they have shown by enforcing rules for rules sake, will not lead to long term customer loyalty growth.
Don’t break the rules every time, or customers will walk all over you. But carefully considered rule-breaks can be a big winner for your online store. And reputation can be a big differentiator online in a world where social media really counts!
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