A subtle problem with discounting your physical products

A little over a year ago, I bought consumer-oriented electronic product. I used a discount code that I either searched for or was mailed in a promo. Since then, I keep getting emailed special promotional codes for around 25% off future purchases.

Flash forward to today. The internal rechargeable battery doesn’t hold a charge any longer. It went from needing to charge about once a week to twice a day. And it’s not that convenient to charge.

I had a very nice conversation over Twitter and email with their support team. They suggested I try several things to bring the device back to health, but none worked. In the end, they said there’s not much they can do because they offer a year’s warranty. But they offered me a 25% discount code as a way of apologizing.

So, here’s what’s wrong. They don’t have a lot of flexiiblity in what they do. I don’t expect they can offer me a replacement because I’m out of warranty. On the other hand, the code they offered me is like paying full price in my eyes. While the product was good, it wasn’t great. And it stopped working a lot sooner than I expected.

My point is this. They have unintentionally hampered their customer support’s ability to resolve a problem in a way that makes the customer happy. I’m not angry, but I’m not happy either.