GAWD!!!
warm
My father suffered a serious head injury that robbed him of his judgement. He was scammed by blood sucking filth known politely as ‘telemarketers’. There’s no way they couldn’t know he was an injured old man. A trust company even talked him into signing up with them after they were specifically apprised of his condition and told not to contact him again. (My sister and I sorted that out.) Anyway, he was taken for $15,000 by boiler room bandits.
Enter the credit union. They noticed unusual activity and contacted us. They put a stop to the scum-suckers and wrote off the $15,000 as fraud. I applaud their vigilance, and their very generous and helpful resolution to the situation.
Another car tire place story. One day I get a flat tire. I put the spare on to drive to Big O Tires.
They fixed my tire, remounted it on my car, found the hubcap in my trunk and put that on, and put the spare, jack and tools all back where their supposed to go. The cost for all this… nothing.
I’ve bought tires and had my oil changes done there ever since.
Blue Moon Candles has the most incredible products (custom blended to order), topped off by excellent customer service. I had an online candle party from which I earned some credit to spend at their site. In addition, I had not noticed that I was this months “winner” in their newsletter contest before she happily pointed it out, earning me additional free products. Then, while discussing shipping, I mentioned to Lisa that I would be leaving for vacation for my daughters wedding soon so she offered to upgrade my shipping for free so that my order would get here before we left. Then, another daughter, pregnant, moved home to wait the delivery of her child so I wrote Lisa and advised her that regular shipping would be fine since my daughter would be home to receive the order. Not only did I receive the package in a timely manner, but there were extra congratulatory products for my daughter that got married and the one about to give birth! And did I mention that the products are delicious smelling?
American Eagle Outfitters has a great sales staff. AdoptaSon is starting high school next month and we were butting heads over his choice of baggy jeans. I was trying to convey to him that it was time to clean up his appearance because he’d be dating soon, blah blah blah, and he was tuning me out completely. A salesguy overheard me, noted the quiet battle of wills, and within minutes had commandeered my son and helped him select hip, stylish clothing that we could both agree on, explaining to AdoptaSon how “tired” the baggy jeaned/huge shirt look is and how it only attacted a certain kind of gal, and that since AdoptaSon is nice looking, well spoken, and has a good body that he should dress a little more conservatively to broaden the pool of girls who will pay attention to him. He also explained to my son that it’s equally important to make a good impression on the gals parents (when he picked the girls up for dates) and that baggy jeans/big shirts just weren’t going to do it. The salesman was also smart enough to notice that everything my son had initially picked out was from their sales/clearance racks and kept all of his recommendations limited to selections from those racks as well. Major brownie points scored with this mom who spent considerably more than she intended to that night - but it was a life changing moment for my son and that young man is directly responsible. I made sure the store manager knew how big of a help he’d been and the sales manager threw in another t-shirt at no charge!
The jewelry seller story made me remember this.
A few weeks ago, I was out and about running errands with my infant son (then 9 weeks old). I drove by the jewelry shop where we bought my wedding rings - Reis Nichols on 86th Street in Indianapolis. I hadn’t worn them in quite some time, so I decided to stop in and get them ultrasonically cleaned (which is always free) and ask for a price/time quote to get them re-plated. (They are white gold and require periodic rhodium re-plating to maintain their color and shine.) I told the lady what I needed and that I wasn’t in any hurry. So I grabbed a Coke from the fridge (free for customers!) and sat down with a magazine.
After more than fifteen minutes I was beginning to wonder what was taking so long. I mean, usually they get the rings clean in five minutes or less. When the CSR came back, she said, “I can see that you are pretty busy these days [gesturing towards the car seat], so we went a head and cleaned, re-plated, and polished them for you. No charge.”
They have always been fantastically polite, friendly, and eager to please us as customers, except for the guy that actually handled the sale of the rings. I haven’t seen him there in a few years.
Also, I can never say enough good things about my mechanic (Fred of Glendale Automotive on 62nd Street). I was one of his first customers, and he knows me on the phone by first name and on sight. I used to live really close to the shop, so he would drop our car off at our house when it was done or bring us home if we needed to drop it off. He once gave me an oil change for free. The last time I had work done, I had to get the motor assembly for my driver’s side power window replaced. I had just given birth to our son, and was floored at the price - over $350 for parts alone! So, Fred did the work himself and didn’t charge me a dime for labor. Whenever someone mentions needing a mechanic, I always recommend his shop.
I work in a customer service position and it makes me so happy to see people getting such wonderful service. I know that I go out of my way to make sure all of my customers/clients are happy and it is nice to see that other people do the same. If you are reading this thread and thinking, “Nothing like this ever happens to me! All of my customer service experiences have been crappy!” perhaps I can help you to not have that problem anymore. The best advice I can offer in getting stellar customer service is this:
-
Do not ask to speak to a supervisor as soon as you hear a human voice on the phone. Even if you have explained your story to several representatives for this company previously, most companies have policies in place that require a representative get some basic information before passing the call on to a supervisor (customer’s name, possibly their address or other identifying information such as a policy number, the basic situation that needs to be addressed, etc.) I can’t tell you how many people have called me screaming to speak to someone in charge that had problems I was easily able to fix, and I also can’t tell you how many times I have seen supervisors end calls with, “and just so you are aware, this is the kind of thing we pay our representatives to handle. In the future please allow them to help you.” or some such thing.
-
Do not yell, scream, swear, or tell me that you are thinking of taking your business elsewhere. Yelling and screaming immediately make my goal turn from helping you with your problem to getting you off of my phone so I am not being screamed at anymore. I am also fully aware that we have competitors and that you could choose to take your business elsewhere. That is why my before-screaming goal is to help you with your problem. I don’t want you to leave and find another company with which to do business, but if I can see that you call us 6 times a day and scream about service in the back of my mind I am thinking that it wouldn’t be so bad to inflict that upon a competitor instead of my coworkers.
-
Have all of the information you think you may need to file a complaint. Don’t call to complain about the quality of your frozen pizza or your backpack without the box from the pizza or the backpack there in front of you. Do not call about your mortgage or your insurance policy or your electric bill without documentation in front of you (copy of your mortgage, insurance policy declaration page, electric bill, etc.) It is difficult to help someone who says they have a problem but can’t tell you which of your manufacturers to report it to or what their account number is in your computer system. You waste a lot of time having a representative look up your information with your name and address and complaints filed on food and other consumable products with no way to identify which plant they were made in often times fall into the pit of things that will not be reported. Sure they sent you a coupon or a replacement but the problem can’t be addressed so they have no way to make sure it won’t happen again.
-
Most importantly, be nice to the person on the phone/behind the counter! They are people too and they sometimes make mistakes just like you do and would appreciate it if you would be kind and patient with them. It is easier to be nice and calm if you call when you have plenty of time to be on the phone, not 10 minutes before you have to go to work or when you only have 17 minutes left on your phone plan, and try to be calm and polite so you can explain everything properly without sounding panicked throughout the call. Customer service representatives will appreciate this more than you will ever know. In fact they may be so appreciative that they will go above and beyond to fix your problem.
That is the best way to get fantastic customer service.
Our local Auto Electrical guys are the best.
**First Occasion: **
We’d bought a MP3 player for the car which went in the dash and had it fitted already, but this had left us with an unwanted 5-stacker CD player mounted under the passenger-side seat. We were quite happy to leave it there, really, except that it turns out we’d left a CD from the local library in there before the power cables were disconnected. (Both of us were sure we’d ejected the disk cassette first, but we were mistaken. Oops!)
We went down to our local Auto Electrican (note: these weren’t the guys who fitted the MP3 player) and explained the problem and asked if it was possible to get the player out and/or the disk removed. The manager took a look at it, said ‘sure, no worries’, and we asked how much it would cost.
“Oh, that won’t be the work of 10 minutes - we won’t charge you for that.”
As it turns out, there were very oddly-angled bolts and - apparently also oddly-shaped, as they kept going back for different tools - holding the unit in, and it took them a good hour just to get it out of there, because they were worried about damaging the floor of the vehicle. Then it was another 10 minutes or so to get the unit to eject the disk cassette. The waiting room was right off to the side of the mechanic’s area and we were clearly able to see the mechanics for the whole time, so there’s no doubt they were trying; the unit just really didn’t want to cooperate!
When it came time to pay I apologised sincerely and explained that I didn’t realise what an awkward job it was going to be and asked what we owed them for their very considerable labours. The manager shrugged off the inconvenience to his company, apologised for misjudging the difficulty (and therefore keeping us in the waiting room all that time) and didn’t charge us anything.
Second Occasion:
We took in our car to be looked at because one of the headlights keeps blowing. They tested it thoroughly, but because they couldn’t put their finger on the cause of the problem, didn’t charge us for their time. I’d expected at least a consultation fee, but nope - not a cent.
They asked if we could bring it in *before *we replaced the bulb when it happened again, but it hasn’t blown since. I guess while they were fiddling around they inadvertently knocked whatever wasn’t connecting properly back into its proper place or something. /shrug
Third Occasion:
We needed the motor for the driver-side electric window replaced. The manager said he’d have to order in the part but would ring us with a quote before putting through the order.
We got a call from him about a couple of hours after we’d dropped it off and he said he’d checked with Mazda and the part would cost us ($nastyprice). He said that the figure they’d quoted was so far beyond what he’d expected that he’d done gone into full-on investigation mode and rung around suppliers national-wide to find out if there was a better priced motor available.
**He ended up saving us over $250 over Mazda’s parts quote. **
(Mazda’s exorbitant pricing hadn’t really surprised us. We used to get our car fixed through the Mazda dealership mechanics when we lived in the city and it always cost an arm and a leg, not to mention long waits - up to 13 weeks in one memorable instance - for the parts to arrive. There’s not a lot of Mazdas where we live now, though, and our local guys obviously weren’t prepared for Mazda’s very literal ‘highway robbery’ pricing structure.)
I’ve made sure to recommend them to my friends and colleagues, and particularly to other women - there’s no shortage of mechanics who take advantage of people who don’t know much about cars (which includes both my husband and me) so the ones who are scrupulously honest and fair are definite ‘keepers’!
Bell Sympatico
Back in 2000, I had a lowly dial-up connection to the internet. Everything was fine for a few months, and then it suddenly stopped working. I let it go for a couple of days, figuring that maybe they had a server go down or something, but by the third day I decided to call their customer service centre and ask what was up. When I called, they took my name and number, asked me to check a couple of things on my computer, but told me there was no problem on their end and to just give it another day and call back if it still didn’t work. I agreed to that and hung up. 20 minutes later, the customer service guy (Brad) calls back to tell me that he’d looked into it and they’d made a mistake, that the local dial-up server had recently been changed and that the phone number was different. Everything worked fine after that. I really appreciated them going out of their way to reach me to get their product to work.
Upper James Toyota, Hamilton Ontario
Even though my car is old, I still go to the dealership occasionally to get certain things done. In price shopping, they actually had better prices than a lot of other places for the same work. They also tend to give out cheap but fun freebies such as free windshield scrapers and flowers!
One time, I went in for a safety inspection, and they told me I had a small hole in part of the exhaust line. Repair cost: 900$. They told me to go to Speedy Muffler instead, to see if they had a cheaper fix. I was shocked that they’d actually send a customer away for that cost, but they did. I went directly to a nearby Speedy Muffler and asked if they could look at the part in question. Men of few words, the mechanics there nodded, popped the car onto the lift, and 10 minutes later came back into the waiting room and told me it was fixed. I nervously asked how much it would be, and they said “Nothing. Just a small hole needed welding. We were bored anyways”. Back at Toyota, they were impressed by the work, and told me they’d rather send me to other places for things like that in order to keep me as a customer for “real” problems.
Another time, I needed to get a couple of seals fixed on the engine because they were beginning to leak. I was also getting the timing belt and a couple of other things done, so I told them to go ahead and just do anything they came across that wasn’t more than about 50-75$ more than their quote. As a result, they changed 2 additional seals and repaired something else as they took the car apart. Anyways, the most impressive thing was that they quoted a certain price for about 5-6 hours of work. They told me to come back at 4 (they closed at 5:30 that day) and all would be good. Unfortunately, of the 2 mechanics assigned to the car, one had a family medical emergency to go to during the day, so one guy was basically left alone to do the work. He wasn’t done when we got there. He didn’t finish until 6:30. We decided to stick around at the dealership, and the staff offered us doughnuts and free coffee and tea. They locked the doors at 5:30, but we were allowed to just hang out and wait, and the manager stuck around with us. He worked on paperwork and my husband and I got in and out of all the cars in the display room for the next hour. Finally, the mechanic finished the job, and we went to pay the bill. The price? Same as the quote. Despite 2.5 hours of extra work, we weren’t charged a penny more, and in fact, we were discounted 75$ because they had misquoted the price on one part that they used!!
Canadian Tire, Dundas Ontario
One day, driving to work on the highway, my brakes started doing a weird noise. I made it to work, but on the way home, called ahead and brought it into the nearest Canadian Tire to my home to get it looked at. Turns out, all four were severely worn out (surprising, since I’m pretty good about keeping up with these things) and needed to be fixed. Problem was, they only had the rear parts in that day - they had to get the front ones from their warehouse. So I asked that they do the rear ones immediately (they are always nice enough to show me the part on my car, compared to a new one out of the box…it was needed!) and scheduled the front ones for the next day. They charged me all at once the next day - but gave me a 60% discount because 2 weeks prior, the brake parts had been on sale and I missed it, and that 60% included a little more because of the inconvenience of having to come in twice for the work.
My first one, recently, was my experience at the NJ DMV (or MVC, whatever they call it now).:
I walked in to renew my drivers' license which had expired when I was overseas. The two ladies at the front (I think they run "picket" to make sure you've got everything you need, hence, I shall call them the "picket chicks") wanted to know why I had such a lapse between the February expiration and my July renewal. I simply told them I had been out of the country on business, and they accepted that at face value. They asked me for my "Six Points of I.D.", and I started handing over a lot of stuff, unsure of exactly what they needed. The one picket chick noticed I had two passports, and asked me how I got two. I told her and showed her my military ID, and the next thing you know, they just were amazed at my "business trip", and were so thankful and polite. The put all my stuff together, and pointed me back to the back customer service rep. The CSR behind the picket chicks had been out of earshot of the whole conversation, but even *she* was pleasant! In about fifteen minutes, I had my new license and was happily on my way. I remember back in the day when you had to wait hours for just a renewal. But man alive, it seems like the bureaucracy has taken a hint or two from the public.
My second one has to do with two companies I deal with a lot: Ranger Joe’s and Brigade Quartermasters.
I know it's kinda hokey, but there are some times I don't want to wait for Uncle Sam to order up a new pocketknife, or a mess kit, or find an extra blanket for me. I'm one of those guys that thinks, "If I buy field gear, but can use it for the next ten years . . . then it's not a bad investment!" Anyway, while overseas this past year, I placed an online order with RJ for some sleeping bag covers/stuff sacks, and a few other odds 'n' ends. One or two of the items came in the wrong color, and the one sleeping bag stuff sack was the wrong size. I e-mailed them to tell them I needed to do an exchange. Within 20 minutes, I had an e-mail response saying that there was no need to return the item, and that they were sending me the correct one via USPS Priority. Heck if three days later I didn't have the right size stuff sack (it was a big bag--actually, it was two of 'em, one inside the other). I had a similar experience with BQM: somehow, my dog tags were 'lost' from my mobility folder. I went onto the BQM website, and placed an order for four of them, with chains, and all my pertinent info stamped into them. A week later, I received them, but they were missing two lines: my blood type, and my religion. Again, I e-mailed the company, and explained to them that "Hey, I'm missing a few lines here. . ." One day later, the CSR e-mailed me and asked what the correct info needed to be. I replied, and her response was that, "I think we can write off $5.95 worth of dog tags! ;) No need to return them!" Five days later, I get two new sets, correctly stamped, and the Free World was then secure once more.
I think my final story has to do with me dealing with some realtors this week: I’ll call them “M” and “A” (a husband-wife team) who were just absolutely fantastic to work with. I have a friend who lives in Atlanta, who recommended me to his realtor “Carrie”. She couldn’t handle the work, since she’s about two hours north of me in A-Town. So Carrie made it a point to match me up to a husband-wife team who pretty much matched my personality and tastes (Which is important if you’re buying a house! You don’t want some 80-year old geezer trying to sell you a crappy run down Victorian tenement if you’re a 29-year old first home buyer looking for a split-level ranch). Anyway, “M” asked me some detailed questions, and e-mailed me some listings before I arrived into town. He narrowed down what I was looking for, and on Tuesday, showed me ten houses. Wednesday, he showed me 12 or 13 more. By Thursday, he had matched me up with a place I absofrigginlutely love, and explained the whole offering/negotiating/purchasing/closing process to me. This guy was easy to work with, and if I have any other friends that will be moving into the area, I’d definitely recommend them. I know the process will probably never be this easy again, but I will use this as a metric when buying another house.
Tripler
That’s 'bout all I can think of right now. I have more stories of my awesome bank, but they are too numerous to tell, and you have other posts to read. 
Second on America’s Tire. My son had a flat on one tire of his lease car. I sent him over to AT and told him to either get it fixed or replaced with the exact same tire. Flat was un-repairable, and they could not get the exact same tire. Rather than mounting the spare, they gave my son a brand new Dunlop radial as a “loner.” I got a correct replacement through my company, and after getting it mounted I sent my son back with the “loner”. The comment from the AT guy was priceless. “Hey look we got one back” 
Besides fixing flats my local store has a clipping from the local paper written by the human-interest guy. It seems a young mother with two small children stopped in at AT for a flat repair. It was early December and raining. The AT guy looked at the tires, and told the lady that there was nothing they could do as all four tires were bald. He advised her that she needed new tires. She agreed, but explained that she was a single mom, and it was just before Christmas, and needed to buy gifts for the kids.
The AT guy nodded, and told her to have a seat and he would see if they could do anything.
Twenty minutes later, they called her out and told her car was done. It had 4 new radial tires on it. She told them that there was no way she could pay for these tires. The AT guy told her that he understood that, but they could not send her and her children out in the rain on bald tires. All four tires, mount, balance, new valve stems were all on the house. He wished her a merry Christmas and sent her on her way, safely.
Since she could not pay, she went to the newspaper guy, and got them some press.
All I can say, is after experiences like that, I will never buy tires anywhere else.
One request from my fellow dopers. When you get great service, continue to patronize that company. It used to bug the hell out of me when I went way the hell out of my way for a customer, get thanked (Meaning they knew I went way the hell over the line for them) and then I would never see them again.
Here’s a previous thread with more stories. They deserve the attention.
I went to Jiffy Lube to get an oil change and fluids check two days before a scheduled road trip to Los Angeles. That location often teams up with a windshield repair company who repairs chips in the windshield while the vehicle’s being serviced. That guy wasn’t getting a lot of business from the customers already there. I decided, what the hell? Go for it, duder.
He went for it. I was sitting outside when he and the manager of the shop shuffled toward me with guilty expressions. Something was sprayed, the hood was lifted, and now there was a hole about 1/8 inch in diameter in my windshield. Terribly sorry; they can fix it at the repair shop on Monday.
That wasn’t a great option: we were scheduled to leave for said road trip bright and early Sunday morning. I inquired about the likelihood of the windshield surviving a 2000+ mile trip. It wouldn’t.
Hmm. I had the money available to get the windshield replaced, and assumed that was the only option left. Before I could suggest it, though, the manager stepped into his office. When he returned, he said he had found a solution.
They sent me across town to a different windshield replacement company. They replaced the windshield that afternoon and sent me on my way. Cost for me? Nothing. The manager of JL paid for it out of pocket. He earned my undying gratitude that day.