The best marketing that a company can do is to wait for things to go wrong and then make them right in a way that far exceeds the original fault.
Did I ever tell you about the time my Dad found a Kit Kat with no biscuit in it — just a solid mass of Kit Kat-shaped chocolate? He complained and they sent him a box of Kit Kats.
Or what about the time we bought a Scrabble set which was missing a couple of letters? We wrote off to Mattel and they sent us the replacement letters. When these letters happened to be from the new version, rather than the old version we had they sent us an entire new bag of letters!
And who can forget the time we bought a Muller Corner which had nothing in the corner? They sent us £3 worth of Muller vouchers.
It pays to be generous when you’re at fault because not only will you make the customer happy, but they will also be more than willing to mention your generosity in any conversation about things going wrong.
At work, we subscribe to .net, a monthly web design mag, which always has things to read in it. I had lobbied for the subscription and was delighted when we started getting it. Previously we had Computer Arts, which until recently was devoted to the most wanky, florid Photoshop excesses imaginable. Both magazines arrived monthly, except that Computer Arts appeared to arrive more often than .net. I looked back at the archives and discovered that we only had about half of the .net magazines we should have. So I wrote an email to the head of distribution and the editor of the magazine and they agreed to send me the missing copies.
So far this is just the bare minimum customer service you’d expect from someone you had gone into an agreement with. However what made it special was that, although the customer service chap was being querulous and difficult, the editor of the magazine, Dan Oliver, insisted I get my mags. Thanks Dan!
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