Guarantee with Care

A guarantee is a multi-part promise to your customers:

• What you are promising you will do
• The rules for deciding if you’ve kept that promise
• The remedies available to the customer if you fail to keep your promise

     There’s a fourth item as well:

• How you will answer the customer’s questions about each of those three parts of the promise. The guarantee is one tool for projecting your marketing identity to your target customers. Use your explanation of the guarantee to project clearly.

     Stay aware of what you’re promising and make updates in both the promises and the explanations whenever necessary. A current example of the importance of doing this right is Walmart’s price matching guarantee for brick-and-mortar store sales. In a bid for holiday sales at a time of consumer price sensitivity, Walmart announced they are offering, “the strongest price-match guarantee in the market.”

• When a customer asks Walmart, “What are you promising you will do?,” Walmart is answering, “Give you the lowest price available.”
• When the customer asks, “What remedy is available to me if you fail to keep that promise?,” Walmart answers, “If you find a lower price, Walmart will honor that price.”

     But as with many price matching guarantees, it’s the promise in the middle that can lead to misunderstandings. What are the rules for deciding if the customer has found a better price? It’s true that Walmart has kept their guarantee up-to-date, recognizing that these days, a customer might be going up and down the store aisles with their mobile device in hand, looking for the prices offered by ecommerce vendors on each item. So Walmart’s in-store guarantee now excludes Internet pricing.
     As a StorefrontBackTalk article points out, this means walmart.com prices don’t count. Staff at the Walmart store could find themselves in the position of explaining to a customer why buying an item at the store makes more sense than getting a better price via the same company’s online site.
     That’s okay, as long as all store staff keep up on the details of what’s being promised and have the words in mind that they will say. Here’s another meaning of “guarantee with care.” Take care not only in updating the details of a guarantee, but also take care with the customer’s feelings so they come away making a purchase they consider to be a good decision.

Click below for more:
Keep Your Promises
Keep Up on Your Promises
Use Low-Price Guarantees Strategically
Resolve Customer Complaints Carefully