Principle 5: Conflict Resolution

Anyone remember the early 90′s movie Crazy People?… “Zony, No Baloney”. Anyway, let me tell you why I hate one of the leading consumer electronics companies. For the purposes of this post, let’s just call them “Zony”. A couple of years ago, I bought my wife a laptop from said company. She was doing her PhD at the time and wanted something that didn’t weight too much and that she could easily slip into her backpack. Figuring that laptops were pretty much commoditized, I went and bought the lightest model I could find. It cost about $800 dollars and worked great for about a year, although it ran a bit hot for the last month or so. Eventually it began to overheat and shut down. We sent it back to Zony one week after the warranty had expired. Turns out that the fan had died and would need to be replaced. Because this model was so small, the fan was integrated with all of the internal components. If we wanted to replace it, we would need to replace the entire motherboard – and they would be happy to do this for only $750 dollars. After being told that I should have bought the extended warranty to cover what I believed should be a $12 part, I gave them a few counter-suggestions. Not satisfied with the situation, I wrote a detailed letter outlining all of the Zony purchases that I have made in the past and dollar-value of likely future consumer electronics purchases. It amounted to be $20-30,000 lifetime. I sent the letter to the office of the CEO, VPs of Customer Services, etc… Guess what, no response. Now I just tell everyone who asks my opinion (and some that don’t) about how mad I am over a $12 part from an experience three years ago. Maybe I was wrong about the initial situation, but the inflexibility and the lack of response is what sticks with me.

So, imagine my surprise and amusement that the new Zony CEO has announced that they are going to pursue a customer-focused strategy. Do I believe for a second that they are going to get this right, or is the “bad profit” ethos (as Reichheld calls it) too far ingrained into the business. Maybe I should change the “z’s” to “s’s” and see if I get a C&D letter?

The fifth PPM is having a conflict resolution mechanism that is fair to both the customer and the business. You obviously can’t give away your products, but when conflict inevitably arises it has to be dealt with in such as way that people aren’t blogging about their experience three years latter.