Avvo Advertising is backed by a money-back Satisfaction Guarantee. Track the performance of your biggest ad on Avvo – not happy with its performance? Let us know within 90 days and we’ll refund your money. As far as I know, Avvo is the only company serving the legal industry to offer this level of commitment to our advertisers. The obvious conclusion is that we implemented a Satisfaction Guarantee in order to increase the close ratio of our sales pitches. While the Satisfaction Guarantee does help in driving revenue, its real purpose lies elsewhere.

I went to college in Maine, home of LL Bean with their famous outdoor clothing and gear supported by a 100% lifetime guarantee. Have a bag from 1967 with a zipper that gets stuck? Beans will replace it. A cracked fly rod? Beans will replace it. While this helps drive retail sales at LL Bean, the real purpose is in generating a maniacal internal commitment to designing and building the best hunting boots, down jackets and canoes and deliver those products at a reasonable price. Any shortcoming in quality hits the company directly in the pocketbook. The satisfaction guarantee has been in place since Leon Leonwood Bean sold his first pair of hunting boots in 1912. This ethos is the driving force behind the legions of extremely loyal LL Bean customers.

Which brings me back Avvo’s Satisfaction Guarantee. The real purpose for Avvo’s policy is that it pushes us to deliver and demonstrate tremendous value to our customers. Avvo can’t just be good (or even great). We have to be better than any other alternative on the market, or our customers will take their business elsewhere. That provides a very strong focus on delivering real value that extends across the entire organization. One of the things we had to do was demonstrate the value we were delivering. While it’s easy to see that the fleece vest I bought in 1994 still works, it’s harder for an attorney to see direct value from advertising dollars. So we rolled the most detailed comprehensive reporting system every seen by the legal industry into our Avvo Pro product and made it free for all of our advertisers.

The Satisfaction Guarantee isn’t a no-questions asked policy. We’ll absolutely refund your money, but expect a conversation as to why. If you want to leave, we’ll fight to keep your order and want to know what it will take to do so. The few of these conversations we’ve had, have lead to changes to the site, our pricing model and even the development of new products.

Isn’t it open to abuse? Sure there are people who take advantage of these types of guarantees. Certainly Beans gets customers who wear shoes 3 times and return them for a full refund just because they can. But Beans considers this a price of generating a quality product. We’ve had isolated incidents of being taken for a ride . . . but it’s worth it. Because everyone at Avvo knows that our revenue is dependent on our ability to deliver more value than anyone else in the market. And like LL Bean – this is a long term strategy that will build customers for life.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 5:15 am by Conrad Saam, Marketing and is filed under Conrad Saam Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.