Good Business: Empower Your Staff

The ability for individual teams and even individual team members within your organization to make decisions is important.

I had a good example of this recently. I had purchased a new camera from NewEgg to replace one that was stolen on my trip. The unusual set of circumstances was that I was still out of country at the time, and thus had the camera shipped to a friend in the US who would be meeting up with us later on in Central America. She would bring the camera along. So far so good.

Unfortunately after the camera arrived at her house and she inspected the package, she found that the box did not have the battery charger as it should. Her plane was leaving in 96 hours, 72 of which were a National Holiday!

How would NewEgg handle the situation?

I was able to go to the NewEgg site and chat with a rep online. They confirmed that the package should have had a charger. They would overnight the replacement charger, but because I was calling after hours Friday and with the coming 3 day weekend the soonest it could possibly arrive would be hours after my friend's flight left. Solution A: No good.

At this point I figured that it was simply going to be impossible get a charger in time, and I would have to wait until I returned to the US to use my new camera. Afterall, that is the type of response most company's customer service desks have taught us to expect. "Sorry, there is nothing we can do" is too often the answer.

Much to my surprise that was not the case at NewEgg. Not at all. The rep told me what he "could do". All I would have to do is have my friend purchase a charger from a local retailer, and NewEgg would reimburse me the cost. That was a workable solution!

Obviously NewEgg had provided the customer reps certain limits within which they could work to make things right with their customers. Good job NewEgg! Next time I go to make an electronics purchase you can be sure I will think of NewEgg first.

But the real questions are:

How would your employees have been able to handle such a situation? Would they have had the ability and company support to make everything alright?