It's never a good thing to find out that one of your membership site customers wants a refund.
After all of your hard work, it can be frustrating and hurtful when a customer expresses their dissatisfaction in your product. However, no matter how you may feel, the last thing you want to do is damage the relationship with your customer and prevent them from ever doing business with you again.
So how should your membership business handle refunds? In this post, we will give you a few tips on how to handle refunds in a way that is fair for both your membership business and your customers!
Keep It Classy
NEVER allow a refund request from a customer, especially a disgruntled customer, take you and/or your staff out of character. No matter how difficult the customer may or may not be, always be kind and courteous and treat the customer with respect.
Remember, you are representing your company, and if they see one employee getting out of hand, future customers will assume that all of the employees will get out of hand. So always keep your cool and remain professional, regardless of how the customer may act.
Understand The Refund
The first step when handling a refund in your membership site is to understand why the customer wants the refund.
The reasons why your customers want to cancel their membership and get a refund can vary:
- Your customer felt as if your membership did not give them what they needed or they just weren't happy with the product.
- The customer did not feel that they were treated properly or adequately assisted by your support team.
- The customer just wanted to test your service out and decided to cancel during your money-back time frame (if you have one set in place).
No matter what the reason is, it is always a great idea to put yourself in your customers' shoes and understand why they felt like canceling their membership was the best option. Not only will it help you understand how you can improve your membership site, but it can also help you prepare for how to handle similar requests in the future.
Know Your Stuff
The worst thing that you as a business owner can do is to handle a customer without actually knowing your refund policy!
Not only does it show that you and your team are professional and serious about the work you do, but it can also help to protect your business from customers that seek to take advantage and just want to try and see if they can get their money back (because, let's face it – there are some people out there that do that).
So, basically, always stay ready and never let a customer get over on you!
Learn From The Refund Request
Since you took the time to understand why the customer requested the refund, now you can take the entire experience and learn from it.
Maybe you've noticed that people are requesting refunds for the same reason or are the customers requesting refunds coming from the same traffic source (Facebook, referrals, Google Search, etc.)? Are they requesting refunds around the same amount of time?
Use these questions and allow yourself to be teachable. Learn how to improve your business and its processes. Of course, there will be times when people just want to cancel just to see if they can get their money back, but the majority of the time customers have a genuine reason that should be taken into consideration. Running a membership site is hard enough -allow yourself to learn and do better.
When you create a membership site, it's easy to put your refund policy on the backburner, but it's extremely important! A bad or nonexistent refund policy in your online business can literally impact your cash flow and ruin your business, so it's a good idea to work on your business' refund policy as soon as possible!
Have you implemented a refund policy in your membership business? Tell us about it in the comments!
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