Loyalty360 Reads: February 12th, 2018

The latest news in the world of customer experience and customer loyalty.
 
Quacks Abuse Duck Boot Policy, Force L.L. Bean to Change
Brands can do as much as they can to make their products better, offer greater incentives, and utilize data to make their marketing efforts as pinpoint as possible. But there’s one thing they can’t control: people. And people can be, well, let’s just say some people can be “interesting.” And those “interesting” people forced iconic outdoor retailer L.L. Bean to change one of the most legendary policies in retail: its lifetime guarantee. According to an article in RetailWire, people have misinterpreted the spirit of the guarantee and returned items that were acquired from thrift stores or yard sales, retrieved from trash bins, or been worn out from years of use—all expecting the items to be replaced or refunded for free. The number of such instances has doubled in the last five years, and the cost of honoring the guarantee has forced the Maine-based company to change its 100-year-old policy. Now it offers a one-year policy, although it will consider replacement of products with manufacturing defects beyond that. People. Sheesh!
 
Will Amazon Go Change the Future of Retail?
In late 2016, we published an article about Amazon Go, a new store launched in Seattle by Amazon Inc. that was aimed at streamlining the shopping experience in a unique way. In Amazon Go, shoppers browse for items they want and then walk out of the store without dealing with the hassle of the checkout process. But does this seemingly revolutionary approach to shopping necessarily bode well for the future of retail? Not so, according to this article in Harvard Business Review. Remember RFID?
 
Bank Branch Closings Result in Record Decline
It’s never a good sign when banks close any of their branches. Well, then it is a very bad sign when more than 1,700 branches closed during the 12-month period ended in June 2017—signaling the fastest decline in decades. In this recent article in the Wall Street Journal, it says this is due, in part, to fewer customers using tellers for routine transactions.

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