Posts tagged “refund”

Huzzah! Free money!

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The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently agreed to reduce their Registrar Transaction Fee from $.25 to $.22. What does this mean for you?

Good news. You have been credited $.03/yr for each domain name you registered or renewed dating back to July 1, 2006* — $.03 has been placed into your Go Daddy account with this customer number: xxxx.

Your in-store credit will be applied to your purchases at GoDaddy.com until it’s gone or for up to 12 months, whichever comes sooner.

It’d be cool if I could donate this with one click, presumably there’s enough of these refunds going about that as useless as they are to the individual (unless you register a great deal of domain names) they would add up to something of some worth.

Unexpected thanks


Click picture to see it larger

Some businesses operate on a cooperative model where customers get money back annually, quarterly, etc. Either depending on their activity level (i.e., REI, Discover Card), or on how the business does overall (i.e., co-op grocery stores). AAA doesn’t typically do that, so I was surprised to see a check for $25 from them the other day, thanking me for my business as a policy holder. Sure, they could have discounted my rate at the time I paid (and I vaguely remember them doing this either this year or in the past) but this has a lot more impact. Instead of a brief line item (i.e., LOYAL CUSTOMER DISCOUNT) on my bill, they can communicate a bit more about their intent with the money the are kicking back to me. Call it a dividend and create loyalty with me not only by giving me some cash, but using some rhetoric that suggests a cooperative relationship; that I own a bit of AAA.

Their bottom line (if you ignore printing and mailing costs; which might wash out anyway since some checks won’t be cashed) is pretty much the same, but their chance to have an impact is pretty different.

This isn’t a huge winner or anything, but it’s an interesting example.

Intuit Customer Survey

I’m doing an online chat with a customer support agent at Intuit about a problem wtih getting a refund for buggy software. At the end of the session, I get this

550 Ernie : You will be asked to complete a survey after this chat. One of the questions asks if I have completely resolved your issue today. Can we agree that the solution I’m providing will accomplish this for you?

In fact, all they’ve done is have me tell them AGAIN about my problem (after all the software problems, they agreed to issue a refund, but then don’t, and so I follow up by email and they tell me to call or chat and I have to go through the story again and so they’ve opened up a case with a case number and presumably in 8 weeks I should have my refund. Who knows?).

550 Ernie : I am very sorry to interrupt you. I am awaiting your response, Steve.

Obviously they need to game the system and try some social engineering to get me to agree to fill out the survey properly. I’m sure there’s documented evidence that if I agree to say something there’s a higher likelihood I’ll grade them higher. From some customer research into this sort of metric, I realized that the score is more important than the actual problem solving. As long as numbers can demonstrate adequate performance, people keep their jobs. I don’t mean Ernie, I mean someone who manages 1000 Ernies.

Series

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