BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS
Letter of Adjustment and Apology for Services Charged in Error; Charges to Be Reversed
The regional manager of Flies Electronics, Elias Smith, gets an irate letter from Izabel Perez, a mad customer. The letter indicates a copy has been sent to Susan High, the president of the company, headquartered in California. The letter says that Izabel has tried to get a solution to erroneous charges to her credit card and has had only limited success.
Izabel says that she saw online that a monster TV she wanted to get before she was holding a party to watch the Summer Olympics, and that it was on sale at Flies with free delivery. She got online and ordered the TV. She did not purchase the “installation package.” Three days later, the TV was dumped at her door. There was no phone call to make sure she would be at home. She isn’t strong enough to get the TV up the stairs to her apartment. She got a friend to help and, luckily, it wasn’t stolen by porch pirates. Then at the end of the month, she discovered that her credit card was charged not only for the TV and taxes, but that a delivery charge of $89.99 had been applied, with tax on the delivery to bring the total erroneous delivery fee to $97.41.
Izabel called the store and talked to the manager, who apologized and said he would immediately credit her account with the $97.41, and to make it right, he offered her four months of Netflix Premium, worth $16 a month, a $48 value. Izabel accepted the offer, but had to give them her credit card number again since the Netflix would start charging her after the four months unless she cancelled the service at least a week before the four months is up. The $97.41 was credited to her credit card.
Three months and two weeks after the phone call to the store manager, Izabel cancels the Netflix subscription. Six months after the phone call to the store manager, Izabel is viewing her credit card statement and discovers that Netflix is now charging her account $16 a month for the service she cancelled. She calls the Flies manager again and complains. The manager says he will get it fixed. A month later, she again sees a $16 charge for Netflix on her account. She is now really mad. She calls Netflix and is on hold forever and gives up. She calls the store manager twice again, but both times he is “busy” according to the person answering the phone. She relates all this in her letter and demands to get her $32 back, and to be assured that the charge will not appear again on her credit card, and tells you that she is “fed up” with Flies’ incompetence.
Elias checks their computer’s purchase records, sees all of Izabel’s purchases from Flies and determines Izabel is a loyal customer who spends thousands each year at Flies. Elias tells you, his assistant, to write a letter to Izabel and assure her she will get her money back, and perhaps you might offer an additional four months of free Netflix to “make it right.”
Your job is to write that letter using what you learn in class and Chapter 8, carefully considering how to handle a good client who is justifiably mad. You realize that it wasn’t Flies that caused the last problem, but it’s an error by Netflix. You first ask your boss whether you are authorized to pay Izabel back the $32 to her credit card and hope to recover it from Netflix (good luck on that!). Your boss says to offer her $32 and you decide whether to make her ask for it, or to go ahead and confirm the $32 credit with the letter. He also authorizes you to issue a coupon worth $25 on her next purchase.
11 point typeface, 0.8” margins all around on this assignment, 1.5 line spacing except headers, limit one page.
