November’s A chat with Ashton Harrison, founder, president/CEO, Shades of Light

CS: What do you mean by not having customer policies?
AH: That’s interesting. Sales people always want me to say, “Let’s have a policy that the customer can’t return something after a year.” And I won’t do that. We had a customer who returned some outdoor lights he had purchased when he was building his house. He ended up not needing both of them. It wasn’t even a current product, but we took it back, full price. I don’t want policies you can hide behind. Work something out with the customer. I don’t care how long they’ve had it; if a product stops working, we’re going to take it back, fix it or give the customer a new one. We’ll figure something out. I empower the sales people and CSRs to make those decisions by asking “What do you think you should do?” They have to make the decision, and after a while, they get used to it.