Good Customer Service

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

OK, in response to IVN’s comment that nobody posts threads about satisfactory customer service, I’ll kick off the thread.

I called Royal Caribbean to make a reservation for a belated honeymoon cruise … in fear that there would be no handicapped cabins left this close to the Feb 5th sailing. On the Cruise Critic message boards in the disable cruiser area everybody kept commenting on how cruise lines would book nonhandicapped people in and not try and reserve the cabins for those who need them [instead of people who just want the extra space] Lo and behold, RCCI actually makes sure that the people booking the cabins actually need them [and they make you fill out a form specifying your needs]

I called, and spoke with a CS person, 10 minutes later we were booked into a handicapped cabin, on the cruise I specifically wanted, paperwork emailed over … contact information for a contact on the ship … everything. All we need to do is print out the luggage tags and paperwork, and show up at the pier with paperwork and passport in hand. Everything is prepaid except for tips and whatever we choose to spend on booze and trinkets on the boat.


When I was wearing my LL Bean red hudson bay blanket jacket I inherited from my grandmother to the store in Maine, I commented to the clerk about the hole in the pocket being the only damage on a 50 year old coat, they took it out back and fixed the pocket. They also added a spiffy little fob thingy to the zipper pull.

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next?
2

Nordstrom has never let me down.

For some reason, I always get good customer service at auto-service places. Whether it’s a Quik-Lube place, a normal shop, or the dealer, I always seem to leave happy (if somewhat poorer).

There’s a full-service carwash (which is itself a rarity) in the college town where I used to live that always did a great job and had a super-friendly vibe. I miss it.

Mixed results at Best Buy. Once on the way home for Christmas I stopped at one en route to pick up a DVD for my younger sisters. This was the Saturday afternoon before Christmas and the line to check out wrapped back to the kitchen appliances. I started my stopwatch and MsNito got a worried look. “Strictly professional curiosity,” I assured her (I used to work in retail). We were out the door in less than five minutes. I was dumbfounded. OTOH, I had such a bad experience at a different store that I never returned to that store.

It’s not at all surprising that we see more threads on poor service, BTW. Every bit of sales/marketing/customer service training I’ve had said that if someone has a good experience they’ll tell three people, and if they have a bad one they’ll tell ten.

3

Walgreen’s earned a customer for life a couple of months ago. My doctor prescribed a medicine that required compounding, and mentioned that they were the only big box pharmacy that did it, or I could call around to mom-and-pop stores. There’s a Walgreen’s not too terribly far from home, so I went there. Turns out they were lacking one ingredient to do the compounding, so they would have to get it from another store and the scrip would be available for me to pick up the following morning (a Saturday). The pharmacist I dealt with called me at home later on that night and informed me that he had personally driven to the other store, and that he would drop it off to me at home the next morning when he was on his way in to work. And he did.

While I was waiting for my scrip, before they told me about the missing ingredient, I watched a different pharmacist work for 10 minutes with an elderly woman to figure out which of her multiple prescription discount cards would give her the biggest discount on which of her many medications.

Amazing customer service. I’ll never go anywhere else again.

4

I agree with this sentiment, but I think it’s rather outdated. Someone who has a bad experience, and is online on a regular basis, will tell a few thousand people about it.

I enjoy TGIFriday’s, not because they have spectacular food (their food is pretty good for a chain, though), but because they are willing to work with me to figure out what I can and can eat. This has been the case at at least 3 Friday’s locations, and I’ve never had a problem with getting an item substituted or left off. The only minor complaint I have is that the music is frequently too loud, and sometimes they play something not entirely to my taste. Since they are going after a demographic that’s younger and hipper than me, I figure that I’m just SOL in this area, though. If I feel like I’m willing to put up with the music at the time, I might stop in. I’ll definitely stop at a Friday’s if I’m traveling, as I pretty much know that I can safely eat some items on their menu and enjoy those items.

5

I had great cust6omer service just today, and a Wal-Mart! My cashier was friendly without being nosy or overly-gabby, she bagged my groceries in the order they came down the conveyor belt, and she even spotted a flaw in a shirt I had picked up as a birthday gift. Obviously, I wanted a different one, so she finished checking me out, pulled my cart to the side, and told me to go get another one. I came back, showed it to her, and was on my merry way. I was thrilled!

Most of the time, the cashiers there are mute, bordering on surly, or blathering away to another employee the entire time I’m in line, and they just throw stuff in bags willy-nilly so I end up with 14 cans in one bag and a single box of crackers in another and cleaning products in with my produce.

6

I think I posted this over in the Name something you’re happy about thread but it fits well here so I’ll post it.

Earlier this week, I won an eBay auction for a video game I had been wanting. A day or so after I sent my payment, I get an email for the seller saying that when he went to ship the package, he found out that there was a cheaper and faster option available so he used it and sent me a refund for the difference in shipping costs (about $2.50). It’s such a small amount, but the seller’s honesty absolutely made my day.

7

I’ve heard nightmares about our local telecomm’s customer service, but I’ve had nothing but good experiences with them. When a collect call I never accepted showed up on my bill, they took it off with no fuss.

8

Saturday before last, my hubby and I went to dinner at a local steakhouse that had closed for a while, but now has re-opened (much to our delight; we loved it before!) The food was excellent, and we had wonderful service from a waitress named Stephanie.

The following Saturday, I took 9YO mudgirl there for lunch (at her request) after her bowling league. I got Stephanie again! Even though I was with my daughter this time, not my husband (daughter wasn’t with us the first time we went), Stephanie remembered me, including my salad dressing preference! Then, when it was time for dessert, mudgirl and I ordered a fruit flambe over vanilla ice cream to share, and mudgirl was asking Stephanie about how flambe is done; Stephanie arranged for us to stand right by the kitchen and watch the chef make our dessert! :cool:
She got a nice tip!

9

Any time I’ve ever called T-Mobile with a problem, they’ve been nothing but very courteous, polite, and helpful. And if anything’s wrong with my phone, they send me a new one within 3 days, no charge, no hassle, none of this “send it in/take it to a local store and see if they can fix it” like my SO deals with at Sprint.

And the last time I called, the woman told me I clearly didn’t need the plan I had because I don’t use enough minutes, and downgraded it to a cheaper plan…and I didn’t even ask!

That’s good customer service. :smiley:

10

TomTom - I’ve heard complaints about them, but I had 2 problems with a refurb GPS, and the phone CSRs have been superb, the best customer service I’ve ever had. Now, if my unit had been out of warranty, I have no idea what would have happened. And, I had to send it back on my dime. But the CSRs were wonderful.

Costco Concierge Service - This is their warranty service for the computers they sell. Excellent help.

11

I’ve recently mentioned my amazing experience with Leatherman, but here’s another:

I bought a Linksys wireless router in NYC, with a 110V adapter, and brought it back to the UK, thinking that I’d just be able to snag a 240V adapter for it when I got home. To my great irritation, I found that I could not get one that had the right wattage and DC plug, no matter how I tried.

So I called Linksys customer support, based in the Netherlands, and asked to buy an adapter. The girl on the other end of the line explained that the adapters were not available from Linksys separately: you had to buy them with a router. I asked if there were any split packs around in the warehouse, where the router was being discarded; she explained that yes there were, but they weren’t allowed to take from a split, and anyway they couldn’t sell anything from it because they don’t have a product code. I sighed, and said “you’ve got a whole warehouse of what I want, and I’m happy to pay for it, but we can’t do a deal. How annoying.”

She suddenly perked up and said “OK, here’s what we’ll do. Your router is faulty, isn’t it?”

  • “Err… No… It’s fine. I just need a new adap-”

“It’s faulty sir, isn’t it? So if you have a faulty unit, you need to return it to us, and we’ll send you a new one. But all we have here are ones with a 240V adapter. So you we can’t replace it exactly, but we can give you the closest thing to it that we have in the warehouse. We’re sorry that we can’t fulfil the exchange completely.”

The penny dropped, and I was speechless. She emailed me a PDF of a Fedex label, who picked it up from my office. I got a new router three days later. All shipping costs borne by Linksys.

Unbelievable service, and I emailed her superiors (without that much detail, because I didn’t want to get her in trouble in case she had breached protocol) to praise her to the heavens.

Pity the router sucked ass.

12

My 50" plasma TV broke down in August. It took until the end of October, but LG replaced it with a refurbished 50" plasma. It was three years outside of its warranty, yet they granted a warranty extension that paid for a repair attempt and the replacement. Multiple delays and dragging of feet notwithstanding, everyone I talked to about it was courteous, even the one lady who wanted to deny my request after someone else had already approved it.

13

I was helping a friend, who was having trouble with his computer – hard disk was having problems. We thought it might be damaged (he had just finished moving for the 2nd time in a few months, and the latest set of movers had not been gentle). And we were right – the hard disk was toast.

So we called NewEgg to order a replacement. The person answering the phone looked up the previous order, and said "but you just bought that disk on <date> – you still have 3 weeks left on the 2-year warranty. Call Western Digital at this phone number and ask for a warranty replacement.

So we did, and WD not only said yes, the warranty did apply, and that they would ship a replacement overnight express. And they kept apologizing: because the original disk failed (even though it was probably the movers fault). because they had to ask for a credit card number and would charge to that if we didn’t send the old disk back within a month (using their pre-paid label), because they couldn’t promise it would arrive sooner than 3 days (it only took 2). And finally, they were sorry but they didn’t make that old model any more – would we mind if the replacement they shipped to us was about 150% bigger capacity? Hardly!

So astoundingly great customer service from 2 companies: NewEgg, who actually lost a sale by pointing out the warranty, and Western Digital, by going to extra effort to honor this warranty. (It’s probably paid off for them both – I’ve bought several hard disks since then, all Western Digital, and all from NewEgg.)

14

Cox Communications is my cable, internet and landline provider. Their website sucks and their phone menu is even worse. If you ask to speak to a representative you get 5 menu choices. If you pick billing, it gives you your account balance then asks if you would like to make an automated payment or go back to the main menu. It never tells you you can zero out for an agent, nor does it allow you request one. If you go back to the main menu, it starts that loop all over.

Yesterday I needed to ask for a due date extension, My wife’s family is in Montreal and there have been some problems up there. As a result, the phone charges were much higher than we’d budgeted.

After a few rounds of frustration inside Cox’s automated telephone loop, I zeroed out and was connected with an agent within 10 seconds. Not only did I get the billing extension until next week, she also looked at my charges and recommended a calling plan that should actually reduce my telephone bill by around $100 a month over the current setup. Lastly she asked if there was anything else she could do, and I very politely gave her my complaint about the telephone menu. She told me she’d been on the design committee for the menu system, that it absolutely was supposed to give me the option of going to an agent and that she’d write up the incident to see what had happened.

Today I received an email from Cox thanking me for informing them of the problem and giving me a certificate for $10 off my next bill. A good friend of mine is a marketing director over there. I emailed her about the great service Naomi had given me (and told her their website is still the absolute worst I’ve ever encountered in terms of finding information easily, of course. What good is it to have friends if you can’t bust their chops from time to time.)

15

The Bobbi Brown (makeup counter) at our local Nordstrom is great. I had a lipstick that I LOVED but had been discontinued. BB had just come out with one that looked like it might be similar, so I took what I had left to compare. They weren’t even close, but the makeup artist from BB walked me around to every other counter in the store until we found a good match.

16

I started grunting and hollering to get my wife’s attention when I read this - her and her family give me a rough time because I put the groceries on the belt in a certain order, and get mad if/when they’re not bagged in the same order.

17

Yes, I put all the frozen foods together, all the refrigerated foods together, and all the pantry foods together. That way I can put away all the frozen foods first when I get home. When the bagger just slings things at random in bags, it annoys me. There is a purpose for the way I put things on the belt, and also because I have a bad shoulder and I know how much I can lift.

18

Amazon has always been incredibly fast with shipping, even when it’s free.

Archie McPhee—nice folks, crazy products, fast shipping.

Yves Rocher–great green products, no animal testing, nice freebies, good packaging, and a reasonable shipping time.

Verizon FIOS works like a charm, and, should you ever have to do so, you can reach tech support folks right here in the U.S., not India. Really.

Super Shuttle: they have never let us down.

19

Just remembered another:

Vermont Country store catalog/site. Great array of products. Somewhat costly, but nice stuff. Very nice folks, and they ship fast even during the holiday crunch.

20

Amazon Canada once got me a CD in under 12 hours. And I was in Louisiana, which is pretty bloody far from anywhere in Canada! I hadn’t ordered overnight delivery, either. But I placed the order at about 10 one evening and to my surprise at about 8:30 the next morning, the delivery guy showed up with it.

I guess they knew my inner 12-year-old fangirl would squeal with joy over a new GBS CD and decided to get it to me really fast so as to not let her down.