Customer Service Horrors Successes
Customer Service is one of those things that most companies don’t care to spend enough time on but if they did they’d gain so much more. As someone who has had his fair share of customer support jobs along the years I know this as good as anyway. Today I have a really good example of POOR customer service and a really good example of GOOD customer service both are real stories that happened to me in the past week.
UPDATE: This is the original description I was going to use but story 1 has a happy ending as you’ll see if you watch the video.
Example 1 – Poor Customer Service
Ever since Dec I’ve been flying to Utah for 1-2 week trips about once a month. In Jan I was on my way to the airport for one of these trips after a huge storm came through my area. I woke up at 3:30am to my alarm and a minute or two later we lost power. I had to get ready in the dark and leave home before the power was restored. One of the results of these heavy winds and rain was that a construction barrel got blown across the road on my exit to the airport. I didn’t see it until it was too late and rather then swerving and perhaps causing more damage I ended up running over it and my car hasn’t been very happy about it since. There wasn’t all that much damage just some cosmetic stuff mostly in the front and the splash guard or something got torn off the bottom a bit. Anyway I never planned on getting it fixed as I was considering getting a new car at this point anyway.
About a week ago I decided that I’m going to put off the new car for a while and just fix up this one so I started trying to figure out how much it would cost if I did it on my own vs filed a claim with Allstate my insurance. One would think if you called your insurance agent they could take a few minutes of their time and figure out an ESTIMATE of how much filing a claim would raise your rates but my allstate agent hum’d and hah’d as she was conversing with someone in the background treating me very poorly and basically blew off my question. “Yeah your policy will go up. Ohh you got a good policy now. It’ll go up. How much? lawl we wont tell you that!” I basically just wanted an ballpark estimate would it go up $5 $100 $500 but they wouldn’t tell me anything.
Today I reached out to twitter and got a little help at least a ballpark from a friend of a friend and decided I’d go ahead and file the claim and then switch insurance providers. As I was talking to the claim department people (NOT my agent) they said my agent should be able to have provided me the information I requested (ballpark estimate). Either this person was mistaken or more likely my agent was being deceptive and not forthcoming.
Example 2 – Good Customer Service
On the way up to the Toronto YouTube Gathering my sony hdr cx550v camera took a fall and never got up again. When I got back home I dropped it off at best buy since I had previously bought the 4 year accident protection plan. At that point they took the camera and shipped it away to be serviced. Today I heard back and the response was ‘we can’t fix it do an exchange’.
So that’s exactly what I did. I researched what cameras best buy had what cameras sony had and found that best buy didn’t actually carry the comparable 2012 model of the 2012 camera I broke. I did find one that was similar on most specs the only ones I’d lose out on being 1) it had half the memory (32 gb vs 64) and 2) it was heavier and bulkier.
Although I’d have been 100% ok with them just fixing my existing camera and I’d have preferred getting the sony camera that was equivalent in specs to mine I had gone into best buy knowing I’d accept the hdr pj 710v if they were to exchange it for that.
When I went into the store tonight I first went over to the camera section and started looking at the camera to see if I did like it. I worked with the camera rep there to compare that one plus another one he thought was similar and my old camera and at the end of that decided the pj 710v would be the only one I’d accept.
After spending about an hour with the geek squad guy and the customer service desk person (it took a long while for them to research stuff in the back) I finally was presented with their offer store credit equivalent for what I paid for my last camera. See though the problem with that is camera I wanted isn’t sold by best buy!
I asked to speak with the manager at this point and he was really nice. He saw that I was indeed a really good customer of theirs and was able to basically mark the the 710v down to the price I paid for my 550v (a $150 mark down)! I ended up also spending $200 on the 3 year plan for this camera so all in all counting my two protection plans I paid (my old one ended with this replacement) I got a $1300 camera for $450. Not too bad. It took a while but I was really happy how things turned out and I’m sure I’ll be shopping at best buy again soon.
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