Microsoft suggests customer donate extra X-Box they sent him. | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft suggests customer donate extra X-Box they sent him.

consumerist.com

139 pointsryanmolden27 comments

Very cool. Had it been Paypal, they'd want a picture of a burned X-Box surrounded by crying children to prove authenticity.

MS has been controversial commercially, but socially I think they've done a decent job of "Don't Be Evil", for example in their treatment of Gay and Lesbian employees - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_and_Lesbian_Employees_at_Mi...

I laughed out loud on that one (made the guy next to me jump.)

I gotta say, good PR or not, easier or not, the email saying we noticed our own mistake, let something good come out of it, really does make me like them a bit more.

For what it's worth:

As a Microsoft employee, I'm also strongly encouraged to donate to the charities of my choice. Microsoft will match all of my donations, dollar for dollar, with no preferences (I know people who've had Microsoft match their donations to the EFF and FSF).

Worked at a non-profit for a while, and we had quite a few free licenses that were bought at the MS company store and then donated to us. They were a little tricky in their conditions, but nothing beats free for expensive licences.

For the record: http://techsoup.org is an organization that makes it easy for non-profits to get cheap/free software licenses and hardware. They've worked out deals with many major companies, not just Microsoft.

Here's a list of their most popular software that you can get through TechSoup: http://www.techsoup.org/stock/Default.asp?cg=lnav&visit=...

PayPal once refunded me out of their own pocket for a seller's obvious mistake. This was for about $30 USD and only a few months ago. I was blown away.

PayPal isn't all bad.

I would like to hear the other side of this story, though.

From what I understand, sellers are the ones that get stiffed in almost all PayPal disputes. As a buyer, I'm not surprised you had a good experience.

Note: As both a seller and a buyer, I've never had a problem with PayPal.

Are you sure they didn't charge the seller that $30? That seems to be PayPal's standard practice.

Quite sure.

I believe PayPal refunded me simply so I wouldn't sue them... but who knows?

Here is the lowdown...

I purchased ~10 1500W rated ATX power cords on ebay from a seller in china.

I fired up 2-3 servers and the cords literally started smoking/melting under ~300 watts of load.

Upon dissection of the cords, it was obvious they were fakes and would never be able to stand 1500 watts of load. They were all comprised of hundreds of 30+ gauge wires.

Long story short... I had to pay for shipment back to china in order to receive a refund.

I wrote to paypal in my furious state, explaining how the seller had nearly burnt down my home (what if the cables went as soon as I stepped out for a smoke?)... and they refunded me literally out of their own pocket.

They said [sic] ... "typically you must return the items but in this case we will refund the payment for you".

I wrote them back wishing the seller would have been reprimanded some how or have had to felt the loss but that was the last I heard from them.

Props to Microsoft, but this is actually pretty routine. (It was literally written policy at a previous employer of mine.)

Manual exception handling at the warehouse is crazily expensive. It is much, much easier to write it off (as shrinkage, not charity) than to get the item back into active inventory (all the fun of chasing invoices, except the amount payable is "one XBox", and the person doing the chasing sees their general productivity go to pot), particularly as it may have been opened. The charity suggestion removes many customer objections and ends the ongoing CS expense almost immediately.

Agreed, but the charity bit was a special touch:

  In the spirit of the season, you might consider 
  donating it to the charity of your choice

Beats a standard "you keep it" corporate letter.

Just staying, our literally written policy was "Offer DDD": donate, destroy, or "dispose of" (a polite euphemism for "You keep it") the misshipped item. I would have added the Christmas flourish if I were saying it in December, too, but the options would have been the same in July. (n.b. The business does not care what you do. We want to convey, in the politest possible way, that we both don't want it and don't want to talk to you about it.)

I just ran into it for the first time. I bought an MHL cable from Monoprice, and it was DOA. I requested an RMA; they asked one question to make sure it wasn't pilot error, then said they'd send a new cable, and I didn't need to send the old one back. I was pleased; my gold standard has been Amazon, where they pay the shipping, but I'm still out the time it takes to go to the post office.

Agreed. Amazon could use a similar policy rather than having to ship stuff back. For example, I ordered something from Amazon worth $200. A few days later, the price dropped to $100. I already had it unboxed and wired into my setup so I called Amazon and said do a price match. Instead, they wanted me to ship the old one back and reorder the new one. I'm like why? Now, I have to be out $8 shipping it back to them, they are out whatever to ship the new item back and they still give me $100 back. But that was policy and that is what I had to do. Makes no sense. Seems like UPS comes out ahead.

I've actually had Amazon suggest I donate a shipment that arrived a week past the projected shipping date, with a replacement already on the way.

That was almost 10 years ago, though. Maybe policy has changed, or your case is a different process for them where they need it shipped back.

"they wanted me to ship the old one back and reorder the new one. I'm like why?"

Because if they put a barrier to entry some people won't do it and they'll have saved themselves $100?

While this is obviously great (and it's wonderful to see this sort of action more often from companies) it's no-brainer PR: the cost of a 360 (retailing for around $300 nowadays) for a positive spot in Consumerist.

Not to mention whoever it gets donated to is likely going to end up spending $1000+ over the lifetime on games, accessories, subscriptions, etc.

It's a nice gesture, yes, but I still doubt they will be "out" anything for it in the long run.

I used to work for a company that shipped products. It was a pain in the butt to have customers ship stuff back to us, even if we sent them 2 or 3 of something by mistake. We did this all the time. Well handled though.

Some of you might be surprised but MSFT provides some of the best costomer service. A good friend of mine built his PC and once a week it would blue screen. He spent hours trying to figure out which hardware component caused it but gave up and called MSFT. Their CS rep spent 2 hours on the phone with my friend until they figured out what the issue was. The guy gave steps to fix the issue, without having to buy anything and even called the next week to verify that it didn't happen again. They did all that for free. PROPS!

That is very good on Microsoft's part. I guess they are finally catching up on Bill Gate's philanthropy route :)

Very good on Timothy's part too. In the same situation, I would probably sell the extra XBox to be honest.

Does this really need to be discussed on HN?

I thought so. It shows a good way to turn a mistake into a positive PR story, valuable for startups to understand imo.

As others have pointed out the cost of this for Microsoft is miniscule compared to both the positive press from Consumerist and the, likely, positive word of mouth of the person who got the extra X-Box.

I'll admit it isn't the 'normal' fare of "Startup X lands 90 kajillion dollars to build Facebook-GroupOn-Twitter Mashup 2.0 in Ruby/Erlang/Go!!" or "New proof of Tychonoff's theorem", but you know, everyone has different tastes and I do love me some variety of time wasting stories to read while my code compiles.

I am now curious. Is there ever a "grumble Why is this on HN?" that is upvoted?

I doubt it, it doesn't substantially add to any discussion except to indicate you feel the discussion is pointless (unlike everyone else contributing).

For people that see something they are not interested in they can always flag the submission as abusive (though that is a bit extreme) or simply, you know, not click on the article/discussion link.

I see lots of stories on the front page that don't interest me, I simply don't read them or upvote them. If the community at large disagrees with my assesment and chooses to upvote/comment on the stories, so be it.

Occasionally, yes, but you don't see it because such a story will be flagged off the front page shortly after.

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