Saga of a Cell Phone Charger: How Best Buy & Office Depot Came Up Short

Of all the distinctions between e-tailers over brick-and-mortar retailers, few are more resounding than the price differential between technology accessories.

Cables, in particular, are drastically more expensive in physical stores. HDMI cables equivalent to those that cost only a dollar or two online can easily go for $30 or $40 at a store like Best Buy. True, the brick-and-mortar retailers offer the "assurance" that comes with a brand name, widely-distributed item, but at the end of the day, an Amazon.com customer would have no problem finding a significantly-cheaper generic cable that lives up to the same technological standard.

The scenario is similar for phone chargers. While the first Amazon search result for "iPhone Charger" reveals a product for $2.59, comparable products at Best Buy cost a minimum of $20. Though technically small in the grand scheme of things (with all we spend, what is another $20?), the markup is outrageous from a percentage standpoint.

But unlike HDMI cables and the like, phone chargers are a far more crucial item—and if one loses his charger, especially in this era of crushing our cell phone batteries with 4G networking, web, email, games and intensive applications, he may not have the opportunity to wait for the online order to ship. He may be held prisoner to the brick-and-mortar markup.

And to the extent that the "convenience surcharge" can only go so far, should he not at least expect some of the significant price increase to be returned via quality service?

Sadly, Best Buy and Office Depot were not up to the task when I attempted to purchase an iPhone charger yesterday, and their failures represent a far-too-common tendency to approach customer service challenges without considering the actual customer’s perspective.

After locating the cheapest possible option on Best Buy (about $23 after tax), I placed an in-store pickup order and quickly went to the location to pick up my charger. That process was fine, but upon returning to the office, I found out that the actual AV/outlet connector was a dud. The USB cable worked, but as I specifically paid for the ability to plug the phone into the wall (a faster, simpler charge), I couldn’t accept this product.

With only 4% battery on my phone, I quickly went back to Best Buy to exchange the broken charger. I quickly explained to the customer service rep that I had just purchased this via an online order and wanted to get a new one, and given my last experience, I was hoping I could try the cable out in the store just to make sure there wasn’t an inherent compatibility issue with my phone.

She said "no" to the latter request, which seemed ridiculous, but one cannot expect the kitchen sink. More troubling, however, was her next comment: "Hmm, it looks like this order was made today—did you just buy this?" She completely ignored what I had told her seconds earlier.

And things only spiraled downward from there. She noted that because the order was so recent, the payment had not yet been processed (even though I had received a ‘pickup confirmation’ email confirming the transaction was inputted to the system), and I thus could not make the exchange. "It’s no big deal," she ‘assured’ me, "you can just come back tomorrow or the next day."

Wait a minute. I am a customer willingly buying a charger at a ridiculous markup—should we not at least consider the possibility that I can’t come back tomorrow and need to charge the phone now?

She eventually proposed that I pay for the 2^ndcharger and then wait to return the phone later or at least until a refund could be processed. Certainly, in the grand scheme of things, this was possible (I have more than another $23 to my name), but it seemed light years beyond unintuitive. As a policy, why should the company expect me to front them money as a cover for their own shortcoming? And even if one views a $23 fee as a drop in the bucket, what about those customers who encounter this sort of issue when buying a $2000 laptop or TV?

Worse, there were at least two obvious options for addressing this situation. Since I had apparently not yet been formally charged for the original purchase, why not simply cancel that order and let me buy the new charger as a standalone transaction? Or, alternatively, why not give me a full price register discount for the new charger and keep the original charge intact? I’m sure there are more possibilities, and I can’t believe Best Buy has not prepared for this sort of situation.

Frustrated by this utter lack of customer-centricity, I refused to give the store another dime and asked if there was a way to simply get a refund. She now attributed the issue to something with the computer system (rather than a reality of the store’s return policy) and said the best she could do is fill out a downtime form to confirm the future filing of a refund. While this, in theory, is not much worse than a refund (after all, many credit card refunds do not instantly apply to the account), it was still baffling to see a business expect me, the customer, to suffer due to a systems issue on the merchant’s end.

Remember my coffee shop issue? When two comparable coffee shops suffered outages on their credit card systems, the one that got it right—and earned my future business—accepted the loss that sometimes accompanies responsibility and gave me the coffee for free.

A store should never let a customer walk out of a store believing he was held accountable for the retailer’s internal issues.

(As a further point of frustration, I later Tweeted Best Buy’s "Twelpforce" account about the issue, and received no reply. While I know this kind of issue is not the focus of Twelpforce, a complaint Tweet I sent to the main Best Buy account earlier this year got no reply, so I figured I’d try something different. Nothing changed.)

Still without a charger (and now at 2%) and nearing the 5 o’clock whistle, I checked out the website for Office Depot, which has a location near my train station. I noticed one for $25—the only one below $30--and confirmed via the website that the product was in stock.

Once at the store, I could not find the $25 product and asked a rep for assistance. She looked it up on the system, which confirmed that three were in stock, but then determined that she could not find the charger and that it very likely was sent back to the warehouse as poor-performing inventory. She was very nice and apologetic, but she was also not proactive in working to overcome this setback. She didn’t, for instance and very much to my surprise, offer a comparable discount on the one charger that was in stock.

More importantly, she did not appreciate the magnitude of the customer experience failure. She saw that I was disappointed that they did not have the product I wanted, but she contextualized that disappointment more in the way childhood me would have felt in the event that the bookstore did not yet carry the new Goosebumps book. She did not think about the implications; that I, for all she knew, might have traveled from 30 or 40 minutes away based on the assurance the good was in stock; or that I, lacking battery life, might desperately need the charger immediately.

I left and ended up buying a charger from RadioShack on my walk home.

For the head-scratching readers wondering why I’m complaining about a $20-30 phone charger, note that my frustration here stems more from my role as a customer management analyst than it does from my role as a customer who needed to charge his iPhone. In both cases, the retail representatives approached the customer management challenge from an outside-looking-in perspective.

Viewing their systems and standard operating procedures as more important drivers than the happiness of the customer, they naturally felt no incentive to step inside the customer’s shoes and think about how their shortcomings are contributing to a negative experience. They thus went with the simplest customer care option—do nothing more than the system readily facilitates—and did not accept "ownership" of the interaction.

Worse, in such situations, the representative is likely content rationalizing that if the customer was upset, he is upset because he has unrealistic expectations for dealing with a broken, static retail system—not because I, the rep, did not put his needs at the top of the pyramid.

That kind of attitude creates further damage by skewing the rep’s perspective of the interaction. Instead of empathizing with the customer and determining how his system is failing that customer, he instead positions himself on the defensive, viewing the customer as wrong for not appreciating the restrictions of the existing system. As a result, he might numb himself to the valuable customer feedback that can positively transform his organization.

The fact that I anticipate some readers reacting with horror to some of my proposed "resolutions" (for Best Buy to rebate the full price of the replacement charger to prevent me for double-paying or for Office Depot to discount the price of a substitute charger so that I would not have to pay more than $25) speaks volumes about how customer service problems exist all the way up the chain.

Too often, the reps are of no help because they are not positioned to be of any help. Their supervisors and executives have not recognized the value of empowering agents to step inside the customers’ shoes and have thus handcuffed them to a role overseeing a bad experience.

If leaders truly want to improve their customer service, they first need to assure the reps see the customer—not standards and procedures—as their driver, as their "end." They then need to give the reps the power to act in accordance with that customer-centric vision.

If there is a sensible, business-friendly solution that would better serve the customer than what exists in the status quo, customer-centric representatives should at least be able to flirt with the idea of executing that solution.

Viewing reasonable customer expectations as "pipe dreams" is simply not the way to do business.