Vouchsafe

There’s been a development.

Booked

Last month this book hit my letterbox. The accompanying letter said:

Hey Paul, ever wished you had all the answers?

I wish this all the time, so I scanned the book. The production quality was high and the writing rather good. Ninety shiny pages addressed 105 questions, including:

Q13 What does an ‘Engaged Employee’ look like?

Q50 Why do we enjoy laughter?

Q67 How quickly will we lose the Boomers from the workforce?

I was impressed, but still disappointed. So I wrote back to Matt Geraghty, Head of Corporate.

Hi, Matt.

Thank you for your little red book of answers.

I have the following unanswered questions:

Q106 Why did the voucher I was given have to expire?

Q107 Why did it have to expire in six months, rather than a year?

Q108 Why did Red Balloon charge me money to try to keep it alive for a few more months?

Background reading: http://myob.com.au/blog/putting-the-ouch-into-vouchers/

I plan to do a follow-up post on this at some stage, so I’ll need your answers in writing.

Best regards, P.

Matt replied:

G’day Paul,

Thanks for your feedback and also for having a look through our Little Red Book of Answers. I hope you found it useful.

Here’s our response to the additional questions you’ve got around expiration of vouchers….

For RedBalloon it is driven by two things; our customers and our experience providers. Getting expiry right means striking a balance to accommodate the needs of both.

Our experience vouchers did previously have 6 month’s validity, but from the 1st December 2010 any new vouchers purchased have 12 month’s validity. I’ll explain why a little later.

We act as an agent for over 900 experience providers across Aust & NZ. Our expiry date ensures that our experience providers offer their service as purchased, without altering the inclusions or increasing the cost during that time. But, like any business, they do regularly review their costs and may increase prices (particularly those who rely on fuel) and having to honour expired vouchers may mean that they are running below cost. As most are small or family run businesses this puts adverse pressure on them from a cash flow perspective. We’re all about giving great experiences and the last thing that we want is for these great experiences not to be available because our experience providers can’t afford to offer them.

Increasing Experience Vouchers to a 12 month expiry was completely customer driven. We actively seek out feedback (after either a purchase or taking an experience) and take this very seriously. All comments are reviewed and considered for improvements in our business. It became very clear from this that, with the hectic lives that everyone leads nowadays, 6 months was a tight squeeze for them to do this in. So we updated all of our contracts with our experience providers and increased the expiry date for new vouchers to 12 months, even though we did receive some resistance from experience providers concerned about the impact.

We charged extension fees because our contracts with our experience providers stated they must provide and honour the pricing for 6 months. All of our experience providers raise their prices at different times and for different amounts, so to try and keep this simple and consistent for all our customers and to make it easy for to extend simply online, we charged a flat fee in order to extend it up to three months.

Now we have changed to a 12 month expiry we also allow an additional 30 day grace period. If the voucher is used in the grace period the customers pays the difference in cost to the experience provider only if the price has gone up. Otherwise there is no cost involved.

I trust this answers your questions. Looks like you have a great blog. Congrats on the Seth Godin mention, we are big fans of his at RedBalloon.

Kind regards, Matt.

Again I was impressed. Matt had responded in depth and Red Balloon had reacted to its customers.

For the first time I thought about the small businesses behind the vouchers.

My voucher was still dead (sorry, Adam; it was such a lovely thought) but I did see a blog post.

I asked Matt, and he agreed.

Your Story

So, what do you think of Red Balloon’s call and response?

What changes (if any) have you made to products or services based on customer feedback?

Join us and we’ll

vouch for you.

Paul Hassing, Founder & Senior Writer, The Feisty Empire