The holiday shopping frenzy has come to a close and with that comes a few headaches and hassles for small business owners, specifically retailers. It is no surprise, then, that at this time of year CFIB’s small business help line gets an uptick in calls about return and exchange policies. What are your rights? What are best practices? What are tips and tricks for handling long lines, which can result in disgruntled customers?
So what you do as an independent retailer? Are you required to have a return, exchange or refund policy?
This question prompted me to conduct research to determine if there are any provinces that required this practice as mandatory. As I suspected, most provinces do not have an “official” mandatory policy. You as a business owner must establish your own guidelines.
When establishing your return and exchange policy, you should ask yourself the following important questions:
While considering this list of questions, do so with more than the immediate bottom line in mind. There are other important factors, such as:
In a Forbes article, Customer Experience is the Future of Marketing, Daniel Newman wrote “Marketing research has discovered that it takes 12 positive experiences to repair the damage caused by a single unresolved negative one. In today’s competitive business environment, even one negative experience is enough to lose a customer forever because people now are less tolerant toward poor encounters than ever before.”
With that in mind, here are 3 important areas to cover when forming your returns, refunds and/or exchange policy:
Once you have a return, exchange or refund policy in place, honour it. Not honouring it can result in complaints to the Consumer Protection of your province.
Important Note: if you’re a member of the CFIB, contact your business counsellor to find out details about the Consumer Protection in your province.
If you’re not a member of the CFIB, click here to obtain details as to your local Consumer Protection office.
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