Not Another Follow-Up

Some time ago I wrote in this space about some customers getting banned from a popular cruise line because they not only kept complaining about everything, but once the company gave them some offers to make up for the “problems” they’d encountered, the whining customers started bragging all over the Internet about how much money they’d taken the company for, and encouraging everyone else to start the same scam. I remarked at the time that I couldn’t really imagine how losing those particular parasites could possibly harm the company – taking six cruises in four years and filing hundreds of complaints about each one already sounds suspicious, but the online bragging makes it hard for even a fair-minded person to regard them as anything other than scam artists. It would be nice to say that this is an isolated case, or even that it’s limited to cruise ships, hotels and the like, but unfortunately, it’s not…

Now, I’m certainly not saying that everyone who complains about a consumer product or service is simply out to defraud the company. Most of the time there really is something wrong, and in many of the remaining cases, the customer is genuinely trying to be helpful. I recall the case of an elderly customer we often heard from when I was delivering pizza who was perpetually calling the shop to recommend a teaspoon of this or a pinch of that get added to the sauce, for example. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that we got our sauce out of gallon-size cans and poured it into five-gallon tubs before putting it on the assembly line, and there was no way Corporate was going to let us modify the formula anyway. But on the other side of the issue, you will always have people who order something, eat or drink just about all of it, and then demand a replacement because it wasn’t good enough to suit them. I actually had a case in the drug store days when somebody tried this with an entire six-pack of beer (apparently after he drank all 6 of them he decided it wasn’t very good beer and wanted his money back)…

And then there are cases like this one from CBC News Online about Tim Horton’s, the Canadian coffee-and-doughnuts giant, banning a customer from several of their locations because he kept trying the same stunt with their coffee. Apparently, no matter what they did – even brewing a fresh pot for him while he waited – this customer kept complaining that the coffee was burnt and watered-down, and demanding replacement cups. Naturally, there’s some dispute over the facts of the case – the company claims the guy did it incessantly and always wanted his “replacement” product after finishing his own purchase, while the customer says it was only a few times and he reported the problem at once – but the upshot is the same: the customer is encouraging all of his friends to boycott, and the company is saying they’d rather just not sell product than give it away to scammers…

In the long run, it’s hard not to side with the company – if an organization that sells tens of millions of cups a day does not suit your needs, they’re really not the ones with a problem. And if you expect a fast-food company to produce products that suit your gourmet tastes, you’re probably doomed to disappointment no matter what the specific product is. The really difficult question is still where to draw the line, if you are the manager and it’s your company that keeps being taken for free product. From the company’s point of view, it really doesn’t matter if the customer in question has a legitimate grievance or not; sooner or later you’re just going to have to gently suggest that if your company can’t fulfill his or her requirements, he or she will just have to go somewhere else…

The idea is to accomplish this task WITHOUT ending up in the news…