Money Back Guarantees
I was doing an SEO workshop in OMS New York and one person asked me about guarantees. Their idea was to force the person to sign up for a service for a year and they could only ask for a refund when the year was up. I said this was at best deceptive and that if they were offering a guarantee it should be as easy to apply for as possible and should be as easy to receive as it was for them to sign up in the first place. I said if they offered me this guarantee and I tried to claim on it I would be furious I had to wait 1 year to get my money back. Once I learned this I would:
- Blog what a horrible company it was.
- Do a charge back on my credit card so I got the money back
- Tell everyone I know how horrible the company was to work with.
As a contrast let me tell you about the hotel we stayed in in New York. On the third day there my daughter had some bites show up on her legs, she lay in and woke up again with more bites. They could have been mosquitoes but given the number of bites increased after she lay in they may have been bed bugs. So we go to reception and tell them about the possible bed bugs. They immediately move us to a suite so they can eradicate the bugs. They offer to do laundry of any items that may have been exposed. They also had security take details and photos of the bites. Given that we didn’t know for sure they were bed bugs their response was amazing. You’ll notice I have left the hotel’s name out of this story. If they had reacted differently I would have blogged how awful the place was, along with reviews on every site I could find. Instead I use it as a story I tell my friends about how great the hotel is.