Here’s an “above and beyond” story from the other perspective. Patrick writes,
I just wanted to pass along a story of a truly honest customer.
The software company I work for put out a version available for download early 2007. It was a success, however for the first two months there was a small problem. As soon as you purchased it, you were able to download it BEFORE your credit card was validated. This led to the company getting burned until it was fixed.
Back in 2007 we had a customer who tried to pay for the download in Pakistan, and then paid for it with a debit card. It was the only card payment he had, and it was rejected. He had no other forms of payment, and we had to write it off as a loss while he got to enjoy using his software for free. Whatever, it was our web engineers’ mistake that caused it.
In October 2008 a letter came in the mail with a check from a customer for the Download version. Obviously this raised some questions as we could not process a download order paid by check. I opened up the file with the name on it, and lo and behold, there was the guy from Pakistan who we had written off the charge for.
I called him up, and it turns out that he just moved to the US and one of the first things he did when he had gotten a checking account was to send a check to us for the full amount of the software that we had written off over a year and a half prior.
Honesty, and memory like that is hard to find these days. I wonder if coming from another country and culture had anything to do with it.
(Photo: Getty Images)
