I’ve never done a good ‘ol consumer rant on this site so here we go. I’ll put my grumpy old man hat on…

A couple of months ago, it so happened that I bought a Toshiba laptop and a Dell screen in the same week. Both products offered a $100 cash-back deal. What happened next showed very dramatically the difference in attitude towards customers of these two companies.

How the Toshiba cash-back works

The cash-back cannot be claimed in the store, you need to go to Toshiba’s web site and fill in a form.

But there is no form on Toshiba’s web site. So I phoned Toshiba and after the usual phone menu maze and having to hold for quarter of an hour, the Toshiba representative told me I need to go to a different web site.

Next were several screens of web forms to fill in including all my personal details, the model number and serial number of the laptop, when I bought it, where I bought it, the address of the shop, the ABN number of the owner of the shop and more and more and more. So then could I submit my claim ? No. They require you to print out the forms and then photocopy the purchase receipt and write a note, put it in a paper envelope and go to the post office and post it!!  This all took me about two hours.

So Toshiba eliminate people who are not web-savvy, do not have a printer and a photocopier, cannot be bothered spending an hour filling out forms or cannot be bothered going to the post office.

I received my cash-back about 6 weeks later in the form of a postal money order. I had to physically go to the bank and deposit it over the counter so you can add an extra hour to the total time spent by me to claim this money.

You can also add to that, another half an hour I spent writing a letter of complaint about all this to Toshiba. Did I receive so much as an acknowledgement that they received my letter ?  Nope.

From a business point of view I can understand why they do all this. They figure if they make claiming the cash back difficult they can save money because I bet that less than 30% of customers actually go through all that bother. If they sell 1000 laptops, they’ve just saved $70,000.

Of course, this comes at the expense of aggrivating their own customers who like me, will probably never buy another Toshiba product again. Can you put a dollar value on that kind of customer resentment ?

How the Dell cash-back works

Dell credited my VISA card with $100 the next day. No forms to fill in, I didn’t have to do anything. Dell want to keep their customers.

Summary

I know who I will choose next time I buy a laptop.

UPDATE: This Dilbert cartoon says it all…