Any Excellent Customer Service Stories?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

With all the bitching and moaning that people (including myself) do about crappy customer service, it’s refreshing to hear about a company that goes the extra mile. And don’t tell me that businesses are not obligated to heed “the customer is always right”- I’m not talking about admitting wrong- just places that leave you smiling and happy.

I, for example, love the phone company. Any time I’ve called Qwest for any matter, which has been fairly often considering, I’ve gotten outstanding customer service. Those CSRs have an amazing amount of power, and they’re not afraid to use it to help you.

Why, just tonight I called Qwest because my home phone has been out the last few days. At first it had a buzzy, staticy noise, but now nothing. I put off making the call, because I imagined the repair to involve an exchange of dollars and time off work waiting for the repairman. Grudgingly, I called the 800 repair number, which incidentally is available 24 hours a day, and settled in for a nice long wait and then sticker shock and/or disappointment. Life has trained me well.

After only a 5 minute wait, when I’d been repeatedly warned by the system that my wait time could possibly be long, as they were experiencing a high call volume, a very pleasant young lady came on the line. I explained the problem and upon questioning informed her that yes, indeed it has been raining a lot. In fact, it’s the monsoon season, with violent lightening/thunderstorms and deluges of rain. Somehow, she uses her magic computer screen to determine that that is exactly what happened- my phone has been hit by lightning. Repair personell will be along tomorrow, free of charge, my presence not necessary as it’s all outside work.

And get this, she even offers to switch my home phone calls over to my cell! I don’t know if she realized I don’t have my cell from them, or if that matters, but I gasped, “Oh my god!” in shock and the magnitude of the customer service she was inflicting upon me, and promptly turned it down. I don’t answer my cell during the day anyway.
Anybody do you really right lately?

2

Several years ago, I bought an Eagle Creek rolling suitcase. In the summer of '05, one of the wheels and the plastic housing for the wheel and axle were ripped off while it was in the tender care of a large american airline. They absolved themselves of any responsibility for the matter and told me to go away.

Since the bag several years old and I couldn’t see how it would still be in warranty, I thought that would be that, but called Eagle Creek to see how much it would cost to repair the suitcase, since it was such a handy size and my wife and I liked it very much.

“Send it in,” they said, “it’s covered by warranty, and we’ll pay shipping back to you. It’ll take 2-4 weeks from the time we get it to send it back.”

I was surprised and delighted at the response, since I expected the repair cost to be more than the original purchase price of the bag. 4 weeks later, I hadn’t heard anything from them and called to see when I could expect the bag.

“Oh,” they said, “the part we need to repair that is on backorder, but we should have it in 2 or 3 months. Can you wait that long?”

I couldn’t - I needed the bag for a trip my wife was taking.

“Well, your bag is no longer made. Would it be OK to replace it with another bag the same size from our current lineup?”

This sounded like a good idea to me, so I asked how much it would cost to do so. A discount on a new bag to replace my old one sounded like a great idea to me.

“Free - it’s covered under the warranty. We pay the shipping.”

:eek:

The new bag is brand new, and is covered by a lifetime warranty.

Short version: Buy Eagle Creek bags. Other than this, I’ve never ever had trouble with their bags, and boy do they stand behind them.

(not that) Cecil

3

My credit union is always great (Indiana Members Credit Union).

I noticed a $5.95 charge for online billpay one day. :dubious: We’ve had the account for four years and have never been charged for online billpay, so I called to ask what was up. Apparently, online billpay is free if you have direct deposit. Well, Hubby had changed jobs and wasn’t getting his pay direct deposited yet. I have a separate account that’s attached to my car loan (had to be in my name only), so since I have a second account with a loan, the CSR credited back the fee and set it so we wouldn’t be charged in the future. I was thrilled! I was off the phone in five minutes with my problem solved.

4

I recently purchased some Playtex bras that must’ve come off a defective run. The wire in the left cup on both bras has broken free and weedles it’s way up my chest throughout the day. I thought I’d call Playtex.

Not only am I getting FREE replacement bras, but the CSR was quite pleasant and a joy to complain to. I started off with the old “I have a little problem and am really hoping you can help”. Starting off humble is the ticket, I tell you. She offered excellent advice on care and cleaning of my bras for the future.

I’m thrilled that I took the initiative to call in the first place. This probably would have been just an “oh well” and they’d have hit the trash. Now they’ll hit the trash as soon as my FREE replacements arrive in 4-6 weeks, usually less.

5

My office ordered some little house magnets to give out at a home show. They arrived the Friday before the Saturday of the show, and they had the wrong phone number. I called the cmpany, got Frank and told him the whole story. He said “Shit,” and I said “Yes, exactly. Shit.”

Frank called back, promised us corrected magnets by 9:00 the next morning (Saturday), and delivered on his promise.

6

Bloomingdale’s

I once had to return a shirt. It was a gift and was just a color I would never wear. I stopped into Bloomie’s and was in the process of explaining to the nice girl behind the counter when I looked at the receipt and realized I was in the wrong store. The shirt had actually been purchased at Marshal Fields.

The sales assistant assured me it was not a problem. She would issue a credit to my credit card and send someone over to Fields later to return the shirt. When I asked her if this would get her in trouble she told me she would do whatever she had to in order to keep me in her store and happy, rather than have me go over to the competitors store.

I was impressed by the level of service and quite frankly the honesty.

As an aside, a month later I tried to return a shirt at Marshal Fields (this time it actually was purchased there) and was given so much grief that I finally gave up and told the manager to forget it, that I was going to Bloomingdale’s, that I knew for a fact they would take the shirt back and that I would be giving them my business from now on.

7

America’s Tire Co.

We had purchased from them some good Bridgestones for our Mazda, and I picked up a f*@#ing screw in one of them. I took some time off work and brought the tire to them for repair, and they couldn’t have been faster, more courteous, or more efficient. I didn’t see one clueless mouthbreather type behind the counter, just professional, pleasant guys. They told me it would take half an hour, but it was more like a scant ten minutes. I only needed to take an hour off of work, and I made up that time in the same day. I was a happy consumer! In fact, I might take a moment now to write an e-mail to the place praising the guys who work there.

8

Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E)

During one of California’s recent energy crises, I received a gas and electric bill that was approximately 10 times my usual bill. According to the bill, I had used so much energy that I was being charged not only for the amount I had consumed, but also a substantial penalty for going over my allotment. Although we had been warned to expect higher energy bills, I didn’t see how I could possibly have used that much energy in my tiny one-bedroom apartment. I decided to call PG&E Customer Service.

When the very nice customer service rep. asked how she could help me, I told her that I had received an energy bill that seemed too high. She pulled up my account and burst out laughing. “Yeah, I see the problem,” she said. She then asked me if I knew where to find my meter. I told her that I did, and she proceeded to explain exactly how to read the meter. She held on while I went downstairs to read the meter, and when I came back and reported the number, she told me that the meter reader had obviously been off by 1,000. She reversed all of the charges, told me the actual amount of my bill, and said to just go ahead and pay that amount. Everything was cleared up by the time I received my next bill.

In spite of all of the energy problems, rolling blackouts, and high costs, I still have a warm spot for PG&E when I remember how they resolved my problem so quickly and in such a friendly way.

9

When my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters we bought from Burlington Coat Factory (Baby Depot) two cribs and a dresser for about $800 and borrowed a friends truck to get them home. They have a strict “all returns for store credit only” policy.
Unfortunately the twins were born prematurely and only lived a couple weeks.
I called the manager to explain the situation and before I even requested a refund he said “No problem, bring them back and we can give you a full refund.”

I thanked him and told him it would be a couple days since I needed to borrow a truck to bring them back. He asked where we lived (15 miles away) and then said “Don’t worry about it. I’ll send my guys right now to pick it up.” They were there in an hour. At the same time they asked to copy some info off the receipt so I wouldn’t have to come back to the store for them to process the return.

They processed the return the same day and sent us a sympathy card before the week was up.

10

There’s a locally owned tire shop in town that is great. It’s now owned but the son of the guy who started it around 40 years ago. I ran over a nail and got a flat several years ago right near his shop. I put on the spare and drove it to his place.

I asked him how much it would cost to fix it. He told me that if I promised to buy my tires from him when I needed new ones that it would be free of charge. He made a customer for life and I have sent several people there. He has great prices too.

11

Just as a note, that is standard policy at Burlington in that sort of situation. I worked there for about a year or so and situations involving a miscarriage or infant death like that are the only exceptions to the store credit refund policy I can think of. Though the coming to pick up the items was above and beyond service, good for them.

12

My most impressive customer service story involves Walt Disney World, in Orlando.

On our visit there in 1993, my husband and I misunderstood the monorail system and ended up stranded late at night in a monorail station a long distance from our Disney hotel, with no way back except through the parks, which were closed and locked. A security person noticed us standing around looking scared and confused. He got on the radio and talked to someone, and about five minutes later, an entire bus had been commandeered for us. The bus driver was funny and pleasant, and didn’t seem to mind giving a couple of nitwits a private ride back to the hotel. We were amazed and impressed. We offered the driver a tip, but he cheerfully declined it.

13

I am so reading this thread with glee and making mental notes! :smiley:

Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single story that fits here.

14

I bought a pair of shoes at Nordstroms a few years ago. About 2 weeks later my wife and I were at a local outlet mall and wondered into a Nordstroms Rack store. A girl named Suzy came over and asked if she could help us and I said no. My wife mentioned that the shoes I had bought at a regular Nordstroms didn’t fit right and were hurting my feet. Suzy said it would be no problem and took me over to the men’s shoe department and helped me find another pair of shoes. The new shoes I found were about $20 more than the pair I had bought on sale so I expected to pay the difference. Before Suzy rang up the shoes, she called a Nordstroms and asked what the highest price the shoes I was exchanging had sold for the previous year. It was about $10 more than the new shoes. I walked out of the Nordstrom Rack store in a new and much more comfortable pair of shoes and $10 more in my pocket. Nordstrom is know for their customer service, that was well beyond what I expected.

15

E-loan. When I bought my car last November I wanted to arrange my own financing in advance. The dealership gave me a hard time about accepting my E-loan check, and only agreed to take it when I got up to walk out. When the dealership failed to process the paperwork the following week, I started to get worried (the check was only good for a limited time).* Repeated calls to the dealership didn’t help – the finance manager outright refused to fax the sale documents to E-loan.

I called E-loan and got Tralynn on the phone. She called the dealership for me and convinced them to file the paperwork (apparently the dealership believed that the loan documentation included the title, which would take several months to process). Tralynn called me back 15 minutes later and told me that the dealership had agreed to process the paperwork that week. If the dealership tried to flip my loan, she would not only arrange for me to return the car to the dealership, but would locate the same make and model at another dealership for me to purchase. Fortunately that wasn’t necessary – the dealership faxed the sale documents a few days later. I wrote a long letter to Tralynn’s supervisor to tell her what a wonderful employee she had.
*Note to all future car buyers: This is why you shouldn’t take delivery until the financing is 100-percent complete. It’s a mistake I won’t make again.

16

Long story short: first leg of a flight was hellacious and three or four hours delayed. Frontier Airlines held my connection out of Denver nearly half an hour, saving me the need to either book on another airline for a fortune or spend the night in Denver. That would’ve been enough, but, second long story made short: not ten minutes into the flight I was rather wet*, in serious pain from a bad ankle injury**, a bad cold, and the only effect my Tylenol Sinus had was to give me a serious case of vertigo.

One of the flight attendants (it was a mostly-empty commuter jet) brought me an extra (dry) blanket, gave me some peppermints which she said would help with my sinuses, and sat with me talking to me, trying to help me calm down and remember where ‘up’ was for nearly the entire flight.

I’ve never once had a complaint about Frontier Airlines.

*Water bottle filled at sea level in Philadelphia will react differently when opened in Denver.
**If you have enough trouble with moving walkways when uninjured, the way to celebrate your first day of walking on an unsplinted ankle after a very bad sprain is not to go sprinting down a moving walkway in an airport. The transition from “moving ground beneath feet” to “not-moving ground beneath feet” will make your nice, tender, freshly-healed ligaments much less nice, tender, and healed.

17

One does not necessarily expect excellent customer service from an eBay seller.

I bought a $50 ring from jewelryblue_jewels. (Her store is The Masters Workshop.)

The ring arrived in a ring box within a gift box adorned with a beautiful and funky hand-tied ribbon. If I’d bought it as a gift for someone else, it was ready for presentation. She also included a hand-written note acknowledging that there are LOTS of jewelry sellers on eBay and thanking me for my business.

Within a week, one of the stones was becoming a little loose in the bezel. I e-mailed the seller and asked her what I should do. She immediately responded that I should ship it back to her. She would reimburse me for the return shipping, tighten the stone, and send it back to me.

A few days later, I had the ring back, again in a beautifully beribboned box with a handwritten note, five bucks in cash for the shipping, AND a gorgeous pair of beaded earrings as an “I’m sorry for the inconvenience” gesture.

Most of the jewelry in her store sells for way more than $50, but that obviously was not a factor in the way she treated me as a customer.

18

Oooh, I love telling my good customer service stories.

REI

We got a hand-me-down Kelty baby carrier backpack. MrValley was finding that it fit uncomfortably on him and discouraging us from getting out. We went to REI to try on some newer models (they had been redesigned) and different manufacturers. We brought our pack for comparison. We went their with a 20% off coupon, fully expecting to buy a pricey new pack.

The woman in the backpack section was an expert on fitting packs, and asked if she could instead refit our current pack to us. She reset all the straps, testing with sandbags and a “live load”, and MrValley loved it! She showed us all the other models too, explaining the differences, but strongly encouraged us to keep our existing hand-me-down instead, based on our body shapes and usage type. How often have you had a salesperson actually discourage you from getting the “latest and greatest” features (for example, my husband’s and my torsos are similar length, so we don’t really need the two-parent easy strap readjusting that is heavily touted)?

We walked out of the store without buying a thing (that time!).
LLBean

I have an insulated lunch bag for ValleyGirl bought from their outlet store. One of her sippy cups broke in there, spilling milk everywhere. I washed it according to the instructions on the bag, but it was stinky and moldy by the time it dried. So I called the famous LLBean phone number to see if there were any other tips that they had for washing it. Instead, the woman said, “Let me send you a brand new one, you can mail that one back or bring it back to the store when you get a chance.”

I said, “Buh…huh? I am the one who ruined it.”

She said, “It failed while carrying food, which is what it’s supposed to be used for. So it’s not doing what it should.”

Just a few days later, a brand-new bag came in the mail to my doorstep, and I returned the moldy one to the store. We have been using the new one ever since!

19

Last year when I got out of the hospital I was not able to lift anything heavy, but I had to get salt for the water softener. Walmart got two of their stock persons to load 10 50 lb bags into my cart and then into my car.

20

I’m overwhelmed right now with a warm, fuzzy loving feeling towards all.

How bizarre - it’s not a feeling that’s widely associated with the Dope…

THIS is what I pay the $$ for. This!!

Keep 'em coming! There’s gotta be more…