Terry Heaton took himself down to CompUSA a month or so ago, and found to his surprise that the store was going out of business, and a big sale was going on. He splurged, purchasing a number of items, which came out to $3,300. One of the items was a $269 Canon A620 digital camera — good choice. Unfortunately, when he got home and began to unpack all his new electronic baubles, the camera box turned out to be empty. You’d think that’d be a very obvious oversight and one that the store would quickly remedy. You’d be wrong. Terry was advised that he should have opened the box in the store to be sure — all sales are final. And since all sales are final, there’s nothing they could do for him. And besides, he technically purchased the item from a liquidator, and not from CompUSA. Terry, being a blogger, posted his experience online on June 2nd. He included the text of his letter to the CEO and the response from someone with the title of “Escalations Supervisor” (how many “escalations” do they have?). By June 5th, it was all over the Internet and on FOX News, and CompUSA phoned Terry to make amends and tell him a $300 gift certificate was in the mail. Terry was treated very nicely upon his visit to CompUSA to redeem the certificate, and said the staff were “exceptionally friendly and helpful.”

Now, was that so hard? For Terry, yes it was. For CompUSA, shame on them. No bonus points for yielding to massive public pressure and a budding PR problem just to do the right thing. Clearly had the pressure not been there, they would not have been so inclined to provide the minimum acceptable level of customer service.

Terry aptly points out a few lessons:

This is a lesson in the power of community — the very people CompUSA needs to court as customers spread the word and reacted angrily to what most viewed as a rip-off. I did nothing to manipulate “coverage” — I only wanted to share a slice of my life. The community took over from there….

Another lesson is how the web is changing the nature of authority. Businesses have black and white rules, but the public isn’t black and white. This mentality is fostered by a top-down, modernist culture that needs absolute adherence to rules in order to function. But nobody consulted the people on this. In fact, the reason we have judges in a free society is so that rules can be considered on a case-by-case basis. In the retail world, however, the onus is entirely on the consumer to find someone to function as judge, and the trouble generally isn’t worth it. Retailers know this, and so it goes…..

There’s a lesson here for CompUSA and all retailers. The web was alive with this story yesterday, and it moved so fast that there was no way any company could have jumped in to control it. That means companies need to rethink the whole notion of customer service and then mean what they say when spouting fancy slogans touting how they value customers…. Buyer beware? Seller beware.

Indeed. It seems to me that providing good customer service is actually much less costly than providing bad customer service… at least, that’s what this affair illustrates. The balance of power has shifted, and companies need to begin recognizing that consumers have more power than they’ve ever had before. That’s what this affair illustrates, in spades.

Update:  Contrast this with Danny Nathan’s report of Starbucks making good on his customer complaint, which I’d say was rather more tenuous than Terry Heaton’s, but they came through.  Big difference… extra points to Starbucks, who deserve every bit of mileage from the positive mention of their response.

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