Techwaredist.com Responds to a Negative Forum Posting
A response to a single negative review of my company that happened in 2004
March 2010
The reason I'm responding is that I want you to be 100% comfortable doing business with techwaredist. Our employees all strongly believe that customer satisfaction is our #1 priority. Since we opened our doors for business in 1995 this has and continues to be true. I believe that this incident is the only customer problem that we were unable to resolve to the customers satisfaction. Like any individual or organization: we have made mistakes, but we always have and will continue to strive to make it right and push towards 100% customer satisfaction.
Back in 2004 a valued customer of Techwaredist.com, aka techwaredist, was unhappy with a CD printer that they purchased on our website. This particular customer purchased a used Rimage PrismPlus printer for $2200 (a good deal as a new Prism Plus printer in 2004 had a street price of $5995+).
Techwaredist did not have this product in stock, but we were able to drop ship the printer from a regional distributor. It turned out that the distributor accidentally shipped a Prism printer, not the newer PrismPlus printer. It was an honest mistake. Upon learning of the mistake, Techwaredist immediately offered to have UPS pickup the incorrect printer from the customer and refund the entire purchase price of $2200 + shipping charges on the customer's credit card.
The customer liked the printer, and offered to keep it if we agreed to give him a $300 credit. Unfortunately the distributor that we drop-shipped the printer for us was not able to discount the printer any further. As the profit was less than $300, we declined the customer's request for the $300 credit. But we still were willing to take the printer back for a full refund. We even setup a UPS calltag and UPS tried to pickup the printer 3 separate times.
At this point our customer became upset. I got involved and tried explain that we could not give the credit, but this only seemed to make the situation worse. In hindsight I should have just agreed as our customer's next move was very damaging to my company's on-line reputation.
Our upset customer proceeded to post a very damaging story about the "bait and switch" that happened regarding the miss-shipped disc printer. He then proceed to cut, copy and his "do not buy from techwaredist.com story" on many similar industry forums.
Once we realized that our company reputation had been damaged with all of the negative forum postings, I personally began contacting all of the forum site owners and webmasters that had the damaging and incorrect post about my company. I was able to provide the facts to some of the sites with the negative information (providing our original email string with the customer explaining the mistake and our willingness to take the printer back for a full refund). Many of the forum owners and/or moderators did remove the negative, incorrect postings. Unfortunately a few of them were unresponsive so the original damaging postings are still showing up when you research Techware using Google.
Please contact me directly if you have any questions or concerns with doing business with Techwaredist.com
Sincerely,
Kevin Gabrik
Owner
Techwaredist.com
952.944.0083 x-22
Techwaredist has been in the data storage and disc duplication and printing business since 1995. We have worked with over 10,000 customers over the past 16 years. The above situation is the only negative customer response that I'm aware of in our 16 years. Without great customer support and trust, we would not have a successful business today.
