Winnie Mirchandani started a series of posts on business processes that badly need “angioplasty“.   Processing rebates is certainly a most convoluted process – unfortunately by design.  As Business Week points out, 40% of all rebates never get redeemed  – and the industry counts on it.  

• My best rebate experience:
• Costco.  Simple, online rebate processing, prompt payment, online audit available for years.
• Worst rebate experience:
• Handspring

  (The Palm spinoff reunited with Palm again).  Sent in not only

  paperwork, but an actual, working older Palm III as trade-in

  unit.  The $100 rebate never arrived, not even after numerous

  phone-calls and emails.  They demanded copies of everything – but

  of course I can’s just copy the trade-in unit.  My

  loss:  $100 rebate, $50 trade-in value for the old Palm, about a

  full day of my time fighting the bureaucracy.   Did they lose

  me as a customer?  No.. still purchased all subsequent Treo

  models:-(

Christmas shopping season is here, and we’re

all loyal players in the Grand Customer Deception game … I’m afraid the

angioplasty won’t be performed any time soon.

Tags: rebate, rebates, customer service, customer disservice, retail, deception, business process