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 2^nd. 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 5^th, 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.