A Customer Service Lesson

I recently had a very good experience with a company dealing with their customer service.   As a retired executive of a small company, I know about customer service.  This is because when you compete in a world as I did against huge multinational corporations, you have to offer vigilant customer service.

And it’s all the time that you must do this.  When you suffer a personal loss in the big world, your best customer will let you cry on his or her shoulder.  But if you don’t deliver the product because of it, he or she may think, “Super Giant Company that wants my business doesn’t have funerals.  When number one sales guy has a funeral, they send out number two sales guy.”

The truth is we all like good customer service because there's only one of us and we all think “us” is important.   So what did I like about the experience, which was done entirely by e-mail?

One, the e-mail address to which I e-mailed was setup to automatically answer the sender, notifying me that though the person in charge of my issue was out of the office on a sales trip and couldn’t answer his e-mails because they were usually technical, I was important and he would answer his e-mails as soon as he was back in his office on X date.   The message was written on a personal level which I thought was good. (I would explain how you can do this, setting up an automatic e-mail reply system, but you'll have find out how through a search engine dealing with your specific provider because each is different).

Two, on the morning of that date, I received an e-mail from him notifying me that the issue was new to him, and he would have to get an answer, but would promptly e-mail me as soon as he heard anything.  His tone was warm and friendly.  The message was personal and directly answered, not as if it was in a basket with a million other issues.  I felt my issue was personally being looked at; especially with the prompt personal answer on its status before the issue was solved. 

Three, even though it turned out that the issue was handled by another company (his company was wrongly listed as the product provider because his company was working on a similar product), he answered me back to let me know.  He didn’t say, “OH well, I can’t sell to this guy, so why waste anymore time.”

And we know this happens, try getting a busy lawn service to return your call after they have all the customers they want.  I never understood this either, by the way, we never turned down business in my executive job.  It’s called business expansion.

Four, his e-mail had an address and a telephone number which was a direct line. I hate it when I go to a site and you can tell that they don’t want you to use the phone for a problem.   It always turns out the customer service phone number, after a 35 mouse click search, is encrypted upside down in a negative font. 

And sometimes you have to pay for this “routine” customer service.  Didn’t I buy the product?

To close, I was so impressed; I am going to buy a game.  And the office I dealt with could not have assumed I would, the company I spoke so highly of is over in England and deals usually with European customers.  It deals with American customers through subsidiaries, but I still have to make an extra effort to do it.  I don’t care.  With customer service like this, their games must be great.