A Strong Money Back Guarantee Is The Best Policy

Should you offer refunds to your customer at any time throughout the process?

When you look at other industries, most allow some type of refund process. Department stores will take back items with the tag still in place. Online stores usually will accept items as a return for a short period of time, maybe up to 30 days or so.

My policy has always been this: Make your customer as happy as possible, even if there isn’t the slightest chance you want them to remain a customer.

I remember one client in particular. It was a family of four, and the husband/father had a serious mid-life crisis going on in his life. His girls couldn’t pose correctly, so he yelled throughout the portrait. During the viewing session, every image had a serious problem with it (in his mind). His wife was too fat. His daughter had too much acne. His other daughter’s hair was a mess. In the end though, he was the biggest problem. He wanted his waist smoothed out, his eyes and face smoothed of wrinkles, and he wanted a great deal of hair added to his balding head. Andrew obliged as much as he could, and spent hours working with retouchers to get their large image ready – an 8x10. When he met Andrew to pick it up, he yelled at how awful the finished product was. Andrew calmly took out the checkbook, completely refunded him his portrait fee and purchases, handed it to him and walked out the door. We took that family out of our database, and have never set eyes on them again.

The moral of that story is to simply avoid agitation. Your customer has a lot of power, and the last thing you want is to make them angry. Remain calm, and remove them from your business. It’s a lot easier to give them back a few hundred (or even a few thousand) dollars than to have to deal with an angry client who hires an attorney, reports you to the consumer affairs office or sends in a report to the BBB or FTC.

Cheerfully refunding the money will let them move on quickly. But, also remember to remove them from your database. You never want to have any contact – ever again – with that client.

This isn’t legal advice. It’s simply our policy on handling business. We honestly haven’t had to make more than two or three refunds in all our years of business. Though there are obviously many different circumstances for dealing with customers, approach every situation in a professional business manner, and you usually won’t go wrong.