Going Overboard in the Customer Service Department

by Liz of Lush Beads

I am a HUGE fan of lip gloss and lip balm. I used to buy mine at CVS or some other large drugstore chain. Until one day when I was at a craft show and I found a fantastic lip balm vendor. I started buying from them exclusively.

I'm pretty picky about the lip gloss flavors I'll tolerate, and I'm sure the seller thought it was amusing to get an order for 5 of the same lip gloss every 2-3 months. (I use a lot of lip gloss.)

Early this year, I placed my standard order for 5 tubes of my favorite flavor. The vendor is local, so shipping should not have taken more than a day. A week later and I still not received my precious lip balm, nor had I received any notification from the vendor that my lip balm was on its way. I emailed the vendor, who said they would look into it and send me a new package in the meantime.

Another week goes by, and still no package. This is very unusual, and now I am starting to get annoyed. I contact the vendor again, who asks me to give it a few more days. I do, and still no package. I contact the vendor AGAIN. They say that my package was somehow lost, and they will send out another one.

A few days later, I finally get a package. Hurray! I open it up...

...and inside is 20+ tubes of lip balm, along with a note of apology from the vendor. They felt bad about my package not showing up, so they included "a few extras". On top of that, they refunded my entire purchase price, including shipping. Essentially, I got over 20 tubes of lip balm for free.

...Wow.

Yes, I was annoyed at how long it took me to get my lip balm. And yes, I would have been happy with some sort of compensation. In my mind, an extra lip balm or two would have more than made up for the situation. But 20+ extra lip balms? And a refund of my entire purchase price? I have to wonder what this seller was thinking. The whole thing felt like overkill. Not to mention that I now had enough lip balm to last me at least a year.

Except, I didn't. Most of the flavors were not ones I'd ever use in a million years. I gave a few away to friends to try out, so I suppose it could have resulted in more sales for the vendor, but I also told those people the whole strange story, so maybe not.

My point is: If you make a mistake, it is perfectly OK to compensate the customer accordingly. Just don't go overboard.