LeanMeanMarketing Head Andrew Hiddleston Addresses Issues On Refunds Of Products And Services

TORONTO - March 11, 2013 - PRLog -- Toronto, Canada -- March 8, 2013

While some stores or service providers do not cater returns or refunds, some businesses do especially so to entice customers. Like it or not, there’s this person or persons who don’t seem to be satisfied with your products and or services. Generally, these are the people who asks for returns.

LeanMeanMarketing chief comments, “refunds are part of the game and you kind of just have to accept that especially if you are a digital product or info product creator. If you came to me and said "Andrew I have a 0% refund rate," I'd tell you "Well you probably aren't making many sales either." Up until a few months ago, this used to drive me crazy too. So if it bothers you, don't worry because you're not alone. But I've kind of adopted a Zen approach: it's part of the business and it's going to happen.”

Indeed, refunds are but just normal.

Hiddleston says, “If you're offering a no-risk-money-back guarantee or there's a refund period in your offer, you have to honor that. If it's a no-question-money-back guarantee and someone asks for it back, you can't interrogate them, you have to refund the money. Remember you talked about that when you're creating your offer. If you don't want to be issuing those types of refunds or you don't want your hands tied with that, don't include it in your offer.”

This is a good principle of being a good seller and being a reliable business person. Pretty well, you have the option of either walking the talk or ditching your customers. Either case, it will all bounce back in your reputation, hence, your business.

In the same video, Hiddleston unlocks one of the secrets of his business successes. “One of the things that I've adopted for my business is that we obviously track our sales and our customer data pretty carefully, not only in the shopping cart but also through Excel and various reports that we run. We watch for patterns and if we notice patterns or a certain customer is showing a pattern of refunding on multiple products or there seems to be a behavior there, we do get a report notifying us of that and I personally contact that person. I don't let my assistant do it and I don't let an autoresponder do it, I will personally send a personal email to that person and just ask basically if there's an issue.”

“If that doesn't work or if you get attitude or you don't get any response, the next step is to block that email address for that customer so they can't purchase anything from you in the future. Obviously that's the last resort but at the end of the day, you don't want your customer support reps or you yourself tied up a lot with refund requests or customer service tickets especially when those people had only bought the product to ask for a refund anyway. Remember you're not a library but you do have to honor the refund if you offer it.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx27_iOITvk



The business coach believes (as he has experienced) that most people are good. A number of them will take advantage of your refund system and abuse it in one way or another. However, these people are only very very small in number. Most people are honest. If the offer is of quality and of a good price, most people will appreciate it.

“If you are getting hit a lot with refund requests, I would start by looking at my product and my sales page and try to see if there is a conflict there. Is what you are selling or how you are selling it conflicting with what the actual product is? Also, look at the product itself. Is it a good product? Is there value there? Is what the person paying actually worth what you are selling? If you look at those two things and the sales message matches the product and the product is a great product and does what you say it does, you’ll lower refund rate (see http://www.leanmeanmarketing.com/simple-tip-for-dealing-w...). Keep that in mind, it's a very small percentage of people that are going to try to game the system but most people are really decent.”

Lastly, Hiddleston says, “Honor your words and your customers will honor you.”

Press Contact Information
Stela Benitez
LeanMeanMarketing
http://www.leanmeanmarketing.com/contact-us
Toronto, Canada