Good and bad: I ordered Amish popcorn from a company suggested by a Doper because the listed shipping for two pounds of corn was about $1.50. All other companies I looked at wanted to send it FedEx next day for $20. For $4.00 worth of product.
So I ordered, got a thank you notice. Then about a week later I get an email saying that Paypal quoted the wrong shipping and that it would be nearly $8.00 and they were really sorry and would I like to cancel. Hell yes, I want to cancel. Another email saying “so sorry” and that the best shipping was up to 20 pounds for $17.95. I said thanks for the bait and switch and the hard sell, but please credit my account, which they promptly did.
Knitpicks is well known in the knitting community for standing behind their products. They’re great.
Mine is ToyState. My son got a take apart toy from them (a bulldozer and a dump truck held together with a few screws and an electric drill sized to the screws so he could take them apart and put them together). Well it was supposed to come with enough screws you could have both trucks together, but we were missing 2 or 3 of them. I emailed them and they promptly sent out replacement screws.
I had a video card from ATI that broke. I didn’t have the receipt and couldn’t remember when I bought it - I was fairly sure I was still under warranty by about a month, but not totally sure.
I sent them an email and I guess they didn’t even care - they just told me to send it back to them and they would fix it and send it back. I ship it off and a few days later (very unlikely they actually waited to get the one I sent) I received a refurbished card of the next model up (I guess they didn’t stock mine anymore).
I was certainly happy, not only did they not dick around with the warranty but they sent me a new one without even checking out the old one. I’ve bought ATI cards exclusively since then.
Well, got a mailing, along with the rest of the neighborhood in November, from Chase bank saying if you opened a new checking account, they put in $100. So I did, and they did. Not bad. No minimum amount needed.
New Yorker magazine. I bought a year’s subscription. At the end of the year, within good time, I emailed to cancel - but they kept a-comin’. Then I noticed they’d charged my card again. So I emailed again and got a personal, well-written email back from a representative saying “Please disregard any further billing you may receive. Your credit will not be harmed in any way. Please accept any issues you have received with our compliments.”
They’ve now been bought out by The Big Phone Company, but way back when I bought my flat, I had a choice of getting internet service two ways:
DSL from The Big Phone Company. In theory this should be a matter of buying a router in a supermarket, plugging it in, inserting the CD into the computer, clicking Next several times and entering my bank account where required. In my case, though, someone painted the phone jack years ago, so I would have had to call the official repairman, but you can’t do that until you’re a customer, but you can’t order the DSL at the same time as the line, but they wouldn’t have sent an engineer straightaway as according to their records that flat does have a line (paint is definitely not part of the specs, though).
a company which offered radio internet. As part of a program from the local government, this was heavily subsidized: they figured that getting fiberoptic to cover the whole province would take years (it hasn’t reached my village yet, and it’s a relatively big one) whereas radio already gets everywhere. I got this one.
There used to be this problem where every time it rained on the mountain whose repeater sends the radio signals to the village, the 'net would go down. Call the service, they’d reset something, 'net’s back up, thanksalotta. It never took long.
I once mentioned that when I was on the phone with them. And they wrote it down, thanked me profusely, checked past weather reports against “net is down” reports and saw that was indeed the problem. So they set up a protocol (and later an automated program) whereby if it started raining in one of those locations they’d do a reset.
Not only did I never again get home when it was raining and find the 'net down, but they improved service in general thanks to being able to listen to a customer’s observations!
Attack, I’ve had great service both from the volunteers helping people do their taxes at IRS (much better than from the accountants my employer paid for) and from my local tax office (although I swear to Og and Ogette that in this second case the supervisors are morons; the people who handle income tax are great, though).
Dell Laptops gets my ‘Best Customer Service’ award for the warranty service I received on my old Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop. Literally, the biggest piece of crap computer I’d ever owned, it was heavy and hot and nothing like my beautiful new Macbook (whose warranty service will not be mentioned outside the Pit).
On that 5150, which I had for 4 years of University life, almost every single piece that -could- break, broke. I figured this might happen, and so shelled out the 350 bucks when buying it for the 4 year Complete Care, next-day service warranty. Every single time something went awry, including 3 motherboards, 2 heat sinks, 2 hard drives, 2 screens, 3 keyboards, 2 power supplies, a new set of speakers, 2 headphone jacks, 1 fan and a new battery, I had the replacement in hand the next morning.
If it was something I knew how to replace myself, I would tell the phone-support person who would make a note that a technician didn’t need to be there with the part to install it and that my warranty would not be null and void because of this. The one time I did have a tech come out (with the 1st of the motherboards), he walked me through how to replace it and I did it the next two times.
I hated that laptop, but because of Dell’s amazing warranty and customer service, I almost always had it up and running the next morning and at no cost to me beyond the original $350 warranty.
