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Unconditional Service Guarantees and Client Trust

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Consumer trust is key to repeat business. When a consumer purchases a personal computer or a microwave, they often look at the warranty before making their purchasing decision. Companies that stick by their products or services will make more sales.

But there are a lot of companies that don’t offer a warranty: service companies.

Ironically, guarantees rather than a warranty, would do very well with a service business. A wedding photographer or computer tech doesn’t offer a guarantee most of the time.

Service Guarantees and the Corporate World

Services rendered by a human are a touchy subject in the corporate world. An electronic can be inspected and quality can be assured before it leaves the warehouse. A person that has an exterminator come to their home to solve an ant invasion may not have a guarantee.

Why?

You can’t predict the nature of bugs. However, there are a few things that you can do to offset the potential loss in business while still offering a guarantee:

  • Guarantee that the client only pays when the service is rendered satisfactory
  • Offer a refund over a set duration
  • Offer to pay for the problem to be corrected by another professional
  • Offer to pay any fines or penalties due to the service failure

Corporate clients will especially want a guarantee of this level. Snowbridge offers a 100% guarantee on their services, but if they offered to pay fines for a restaurant that was fined due to a pipe they fixed not being fixed properly and leaking, this would do a lot of good for the business.

  • They could charge drastically more for the services they render
  • They could lure in more customers as a result of their guarantee
  • They could secure a much higher market share in their area

If a company says that they’ll provide 100% satisfaction, or they’ll make the issue right, it’s a guarantee that can be very profitable for the business.

How Service Guarantees Benefit Businesses

There needs to be a benefit for companies to offer a guarantee on their services. Charging higher prices and securing a larger market share are two great benefits. But there are benefits to the quality of your operation, too.

Guarantees force businesses to be better, and this means a business is more likely to:

  • Properly train employees on how the work must be completed
  • Hire the best employees to get the job done right
  • Form protocols that ensure quality work is completed
  • Reduce errors that occur during a job
  • Put the customer first
  • Control your business more closely and improve performance

Profits, performance and quality are all very closely tied together in the business world. When a business offers a guarantee, they force themselves to be better than the competition. The business will look further into their operation, gather data and analyze their failures with much more scrutiny when they have to pay for their failures out-of-pocket.

Conditions imposed on the consumer will negate the guarantee benefits.

If a plumber offered a guarantee, but to obtain the warranty you had to pay 60% of the service cost, it would be overlooked compared to a company that offers a guarantee and doesn’t impose conditions.

Guarantees must be easy to invoke, meaningful, quick to collect on and unconditional.

Clients want to trust service providers, and this level of a guarantee will help build trust among clients in a way that warranties build trust in retail stores.

HubSpot