My friend Bart just spent some time in warrantee hell. His Dell laptop battery died after 12-and-a-half months on a 12-month warranty. As you can imagine, Dell refused to replace the battery because the warrantee was only 12 months. And rules are rules.
Bart is a sales rep for a medical practice software company. He uses a particular IT vendor for his own computer equipment and refers his clients to the same vendor for theirs. Bart estimates that in the past year, he referred about $500,000 worth of Dell business to this vendor.
When Bart didn’t get anywhere with trying to get Dell to replace the battery (a battery which replaced another one which died after 16 months), he went to Chris, the IT vendor. He figured perhaps they would be more willing to push the rules for him, since he does quite a bit of business with them each year. No such luck. So Bart decided that Dell didn’t deserve his loyalty anymore. He called Chris again and had the following conversation:
Bart: Chris, do you still sell, support and install HP servers and equipment?
Chris: Yep.
Bart: I would like you to quote HP equipment instead of Dell on all future deals I bring.
Chris: Really? Over a battery?
Bart: Yes. It’s not the battery; it’s the principle. I vote with my wallet. Please understand I am not mad at you. Feel free to share my emails with your Dell rep as well so he understands.
Chris: I will share it with him now.
15 minutes pass and Bart gets an email from Chris.
Chris: Your new battery will ship to us and you should have it by Friday or early next week. Oh, he asked me to ask you to please bring my next deal to Dell.
Amazing how that works.
Should Bart have expected that Dell would honor the warranty even though it had expired? My feeling is “yes,” and not just because he referenced over $500,000 worth of business to them each year. It should be “yes” even if he bought one or two pieces of equipment every few years, as I do. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do.
It’s the right thing to do because life doesn’t happen by the calendar or the clock. Cars break down, batteries die, and stuff happens. The warranty period is really just an arbitrary number. When Dell (or any other company) warranties a battery for 12 months, it’s not saying that they expect the battery to last for 12 months and that everything else is gravy. It’s a way to say that the battery shouldn’t break down in the first 12 months. It could be 13 months or 15 months. But most companies tend to use years for a warranty period. It’s easy.
I think this is a case of it being a blue rule. I’ve mentioned in a previous blog that there are two types of rules: Red rules and Blue rules. Red rules can’t be broken under any circumstance. They usually deal with health, safety, legal, ethics, and BIG financial. Blue rules can be bent for the customer. This is a blue rule. I don’t know the figures, but I’m sure there aren’t that many laptop batteries that die between 12 and 13 months. Allowing the occasional customer to stretch the warranty to 12 ½ months isn’t going to result in a BIG financial hit for Dell or any major computer company. Never mind that losing Bart would also mean losing a half-a-million dollars in business per year.
TD Bank (formerly Commerce Bank) opens its offices at 7:30 AM and closes at 8 PM, which is already a larger spread than most banks. But if you arrive at 7:20 AM or 8:10 PM, they’ll let you in – they just don’t advertise it. We’ve all had the frustrating experience of arriving at a store two minutes after closing and not being able to make a quick purchase.
Why does TD Bank do this when other banks don’t? It’s because they decided that their customers, big or small, were worth an extra 20 minutes a day of service. It’s because it knows that nothing always works the way we want it to work. And people sometimes show up a couple of minutes late.
If you owned a restaurant, would you refuse to accept a coupon and sacrifice a customer because it expired the day before? It would be a pretty stupid thing to do. It’s the same with warranties.
Don’t let your rules get in the way or customer experience. You’ll lose more than you know.
