I was curious about how people deal with clients who have proven themselves to be good, repeat customers in the past,but are now making unreasonable demands. We had two of these yesterday alone. The first was a lady who purchased an expensive pair of glasses one year ago and never picked them up (despite 3 calls from us). When she finally came to get them she said she didn't like them and wanted credit towards a new pair. The second lady had been wearing progressives and told us that she didn't really like them and wanted to try trifocals. After dispensing to her trifocals she told us that she preferred progressives and wanted a free re-do (no problem for us). However, she refused to pay the difference in cost between the trifocal and progressive.
In both cases, these are very unreasonable demands. However, in both cases the clients are good, long-standing clients who have been seeing us over the years as patients and have purchased glasses from us in the past. I'm very reluctant to accede to such unreasonable demands because not only is it plain wrong, but it sends a very bad message to my staff on how to deal with requests in general. Also, I don't want to positively reinforce these clients in such a way that their demands become more unreasonable over time. Lastly, I feel that it increases the credibility of one's optical shop to have firm policies.
The only downside is that when this happens (and it has happened many times) there is a very real chance that you will be creating a disgruntled patient who never comes back to your office. In the past, we made a lot of exceptions for "good" clients but recently we have been stricter and have been politely declining all such outrageous demands. Just wondering what everybody else does.
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