I bought some pants at a major retailer a few months ago. After wearing them twice, they completely fell apart. Having never returned a pair of pants before, I didn’t keep the receipt. So I brought the pants, which had obviously barely been worn, back to the store. Despite having the original card that I used with me, they refused to give me a store credit or exchange. All they offered was a measly $5, when the pants originally cost $20. And this process took forever, with them trying to enter my info into the POS no less than 3 times. So I wasted about 25 minutes for nothing.

Now, I’m not exactly a frequent shopper at this store, but I do go there periodically for various items. Now, I’m certain I’ll never go back. So the retailer just ensured I will never visit their stores again because they wouldn’t give me the extra $15 back on what was obviously a flawed product. It’s no wonder the company’s sales keep dropping.

What’s the moral here? Don’t do things that piss your customers off for life when the cost to make them happy is so trivial. Surely I was worth more than $15 in profits to this retailer over even a modest time horizon, but they’d rather have their staff feel superior than keep me as a customer.

While visiting San Francisco recently, I planned to ride their excellent BART train from the airport to downtown. When I got ready to buy a ticket, I saw that all of the turnstiles were open and marked “free”. Some nearby signage explained the reason: it was a “Spare the Air” day, in which many forms of mass transit are free until 1 pm to encourage more ridership, thus reducing air pollution. Fine by me, I thought.

Then I tried to buy a ticket for my return trip, which was scheduled for after 1 pm. As I went from one ticketing kiosk to the next, every screen was covered with a hand-written “out of order” sign. I asked a station attendant if there were other working ones somewhere, and her answer surprised me. Instead of changing the screens to say something like “You can buy tickets here, but you don’t need them if you’re riding before 1 pm today”, the kiosks simply don’t work during these free ride periods. They are “out of order” on purpose.

Perhaps BART doesn’t have a centralized way of making the machines show different messages on these dates, so they just turn off the ticket sales system at the main office. Or maybe the main office doesn’t consider the lack of notice to be an issue. Instead, the staff at each station are left to come up with a solution. So to prevent customers from buying tickets when the rides are free (and thus asking the staff for a refund), they just say the machines are “out of order”. But this is a dangerous practice: seeing an “out of order” sign regularly will train customers to expect the machines to be broken, and eventually reduce usage of the systems — thus negating the cost savings associated with self-service ticketing.

I think one simple change would make this scenario a lot better: BART’s main office could print up signs to tape onto the ticket machines on Spare the Air days. These signs would tell customers that tickets aren’t needed for any rides before 1 pm on that day, but they can still use the machines normally. Aside from better serving those customers who want to buy tickets for later use, this would also increase people’s confidence in the ticketing kiosks — since they wouldn’t be “out of order” so frequently.

I travel a lot on business, and I’ve noticed an interesting trend. While many airports still humiliate travelers who forgot to bring a plastic bag for their liquids and gels, others have taken a better approach: they provide plastic bags right by the security checkpoint. At Chicago’s Midway airport, they’ve even taken this a step further: there is actually a bag dispenser, which I think is sponsored by Glad or Hefty. It’s a smart, time-saving move for the airport and for travelers.

I think we can adapt this approach to virtually any customer experience: If people need a third-party item in order to use your product or service, it pays to make it easy for them to get that item. This might mean giving them a low-cost accessory like in my plastic bag example, or providing a link where they can download what’s required. Similarly, if using your product involves multiple steps, make sure to provide clear directions about how to go back to the previous step and forward to the next one, along with quick links to related features. This approach will make your products easier to learn for novices, while increasing productivity for advanced users.