Your Opinion on the Internet Can Have a Major Effect.

About 20 days ago I wrote a post about my shitty Polaroid television set that I purchased one year and six months ago, that post can be found here.

My opinion was quite clear, I bought a product that was cheaper and I paid the price for it, but I didn’t expect their customer service to abandon me for an issue that I did not cause.

Regardless, the search term polaroid televisions on Google now shows that post on the front page. Now anyone that is consciously about to make a decision about purchasing a Polaroid television will probably end up reading that post. When I say consciously I mean doing their research before making a purchase.

This next piece is not meant to be pretentious in anyway, but they will probably lose a customer or two because of that post and its top position on Google for the generic search term. Whereas if Polaroid sucked-up the $80 it cost to fix the television for a defective part, they would have gained a customer or two because that post would have been about how great their customer service was to me.

Don’t believe that I would have wrote a post commending their customer service? I’ve done it on more than once occasion in the past regarding Microsoft’s customer support of the XBox 360. To date I’ve sent my XBox back for repairs 4 times and I’ve been out of warranty for years. They’ve never charged me a dime, they always overnight it to me and the most recent time they even gave me a free wireless control.

That’s good customer service and they won’t lose any customers from that effort. Polaroid on the other hand will, and they probably deserve it.

Note: To be fair, the VP of Customer Relations did get in contact with me and offered to send me the replacement part, but it was a lengthy back and forth process of approvals that immediately made me say it’s not worth the $80 to go through it all.