Above and Beyond Customer Care - Best Buy, Circuit City, Netflix
Posted by Carlton Bale on March 31st, 2008
I'm used to companies offering less than stellar customer care in this age of low-cost, low-margin business. So when a company goes above and beyond to take care of their customers, it get my attention.
Everyone pretty much know that the High Definition Disc Format war would end one format would become obsolete. Which is why I'm surprised that Busy Buy and Circuit City are both compensating customer who choose the losing format. Best Buy will be giving a $50 giftcard to anyone who purchased a HD-DVD Player prior to February 23, 2008 (just go to BestBuyTradein.com and register.)
Circuit City has taken a different approach, extending the return period for player by "several months." So the customer can return the player for full credit, but obviously will be unable to play any HD-DVD movies they purchased as they will no longer have a player. It's interesting that Bust Buy officially announced this while Circuit City made this an unofficial policy.
Meanwhile, Wal-Mart, the low-cost advocate of HD-DVD, is offering their customers nothing.
Netflix, which whom I've been a customer for 8 years, had a massive outage last Monday, lasting about 12 hours. As a result, they were unable to ship the two movies I was to receive until Tuesday. A 1 day delay, not a big deal. I was just glad that they acknowledged and apologized for the the problem. But I was elated when they went above and beyond by offering a 10% discount on my fees for the month.
Since it's tax time, I feel the need to complain about Intuit TurboTax. The software is great, but the price gouging is terrible. They find every way possible to charge the customer more, right up to the unreasonable filing fees. I generally have faith in the free market, but the TurboTax / Tax Cut dual-opoly is not yielding the fruit competition should. I'm just hoping that these companies learn something from Bust Buy, Circuit City, and Netflix about doing what is right for their customers.
April 2nd, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Concerning tax software–I was pretty upset about the raise in prices from Turbo Tax and Tax Cut as well. I don't know if you've checked it out, but I'm using Tax Act this year. You can download the install for $20 and it includes software for both federal and state returns with electronic filing. It seems to be as full featured as one would need. I'll stick with them until they start gouging…then I'll have to figure out if any of them are worth it or try find another software package.