A Penny Richer, A Dollar Poorer

I would like to share with you a story about being a penny richer but a dollar poorer based on personal experience.

When I was in my teenage years, I used to work at a video store owned by a local family. It was well run and the boss trained us on how to handle most situations. One situation that often happens is when someone complains that they got the wrong DVD or the disc was damaged. You see, when you are handling hundreds and hundreds of DVD discs on a Saturday night, putting the wrong DVD in the wrong case sometimes happens. Also, since the customers are only renting the DVDs and they are not their own, they tend to be treat them like crap.

Of course, we would also get people trying to scam the video store and get free hires out of us. We were trained to treat each situation differently based off a number of factors. We would check to see whether the disc was scratched to see how likely it was that it wouldn’t work (we didn’t have the time to actually check it with a DVD player). We would look at their borrowing history and see how many movies they rented and how much they made the store. Some of the customers had been members for 10 years and have made the business well over $6000 in movie rentals. At the time, that decision making process worked well.

Eventually, the video store I worked at at got bought out by a big name video store called “Video Ezy” which is similar to Americas “Blockbuster Video”. I was allowed to keep my job and go work for Video Ezy instead. When I started working with them I found that their stuff were trained not trust people most of the time.

What would happen is a customer would come in and say that the overnight new release DVD didn’t work. My co-workers would say “Why didn’t you bring it back last night? You could have watched it”.

The customer would say something like “it was late and I didn’t want to drive all the way back last night”, they’ll get angry because they paid for a DVD that never worked and often vow to never come back to the store. As someone trained in the mom-and-pop video store, I was shocked. I would check to see how much that particular client made the store and its often anywhere between $2000 to $6000 because they hired a few almost every Friday night.

So, in order for the store to save $6.50 on something that will be returned tomorrow anyway, they lost thousands of dollars by not giving the customer the benefit of the doubt. Basically, they were a penny richer and a dollar poorer.

How does this story apply to the computer business? Well, lets say that you recently did some virus removal work on a clients computer and now they say the virus has returned even though they didn’t touch anything. There is a chance they visited the adult site where they originally got it the virus, but we need to remember that viruses are often designed to repair themselves if parts of it are deleted.

You need to ask yourself is it worth going back, repairing it for free and educating them on how to avoid getting reinfected to keep them happy; or charge them again because its not your fault they reinfected themselves? If you charge them for removing it again and you were wrong, how much money will you lose when they get annoyed? You should probably give them the benefit of the doubt because if they are happy with you, they’ll keep calling you and even though you lost an hour of your day by removing the infection again, you gained hundreds of dollars from future visits.