When a Third-Party Feels like a Fourth-Party

In yesterday’s post, I gave the long rambling story of my first excursion into a retail store’s product protection plan – the Furniture Protection Plan sold at my local Staples store.

I know we deal with third-parties all the time in consumer business transactions. I guess my first experiences may have been back in college, when I realized that MBNA Visa cards were prevalent on all college campuses. Later, I found out that Barnes & Noble runs many college bookstores. Nowadays, we see places like Dunkin’ Donuts that sometimes seem a little more “disconnected” from the mother ship than some of their sister locations, posting signs like:

Sorry – We don’t accept coupons.

Or something like that. It makes me wonder who exactly owns and maintains the quality of each chain coffee shop. Same goes for Amazon, which often seems to be merely the broker of transactions made on its site. And of course the Kindle always seemed like a thinly veiled foray by some third-party e-reader manufacturer, but the Amazon branding slapped on top of it makes you feel like it was hand crafted by the same happy bunnies that serve you the most delightful book recommendations on the Amazon website.

There always seems to be a third-party somewhere. And they operate at varying levels of closeness to the retail customer. As well, the company with whom you “think” you are doing business may take varying levels of responsibility for the good and bad work that their third-party partner does.

I like companies that don’t make the customer think about the “third-party”. Companies who insist on making the customer think about it – well, then I call that a “fourth-party”. It makes me feel like there’s some intruder in the room who is mucking around in my own consumerism.

I like Staples. A lot. Online and offline. But this weekend they handed me a fourth-party: Assurant.

Apparently, Assurant is the company which operates all product protection plans for Staples. I had never heard of them. I have no reason to trust them or think that they do good work. No offense – I just don’t have any history with them. That makes me uneasy – especially when what I am buying is insurance. It’s one thing if an unknown company sells you a widget and you can stare at the d*rned thing for a few minutes and realize that it really works as advertised, and then be confident that it will do so for however long widgets are expected to last.

But insurance (which is what product protection plans are) is different. You can’t tell whether it works until you need to use it. There’s a lot of trust involved in selecting an insurance vendor. Yes, my insurance transaction was small – just a $10 premium on a $60 chair. But I still want it to work when I need it.

The fact that activating my policy was complicated, confusing, and just sort of did not work.. did not help. Mis-communications there, too: I asked the cashier during checkout, “Do I have to be sure to keep my receipt, or does Staples keep all the necessary information on-file for me?” I asked this because I know I will most likely lose the receipt. I will be lucky if I can remember where I bought the desk chair on that fateful day when it falls apart and disintegrates into micro-fiber dust.

The cashier assured me that Staples keeps the info. But now, after a long process of trying to get the product registered (which involved sending an email asking for help from the Vice-President of Corporate Communications for Assurant), I have received a thoughtful response back from Staples support, urging me to be sure to save my receipt, and also to scan it, since receipts fade over time.

So why did I have to wrestle with Assurant’s crashing web server all weekend, trying to enter my receipt information, if I need to keep my receipt and produce it on that fateful day when my desk chair falls apart and disintegrates into.. blahblahblah..

Not sure. But I still do like Staples – their support has been very responsive, and did not once give me a “canned response”. True, I did get some runaround, but not once a canned response. That’s good customer service, or at least as good as is reasonably possible in this hectic retail business.

And so far, I like Assurant, but I really want to know more about this mysterious fourth-party who has managed to wedge its way into my life as a consumer. Do any of my other common vendors also work with Assruant? I’d like to know that, since the next time I am in a store and offered a service plan, I will ask for the name of the company which operates the plan. After all, we would all benefit by knowing who exactly we are buying insurance from, I’d say.