Great Customer Service Is Not Dead And Should Be Recognized
I expect to receive great customer service from the people I do business with, and I do my best to provide the best possible customer service to my own customers. However, we live on planet Earth, where it seems that people don’t really care about, or know how to provide, great customer service any more. That means that I am often left disappointed about the customer service I receive.
In Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service
(click here to buy), the authors point out that we are so desensitized to bad customer service, that even when someone does something very average, it really lights us up.
Today I can say that I am a raving fan of BSW (www.BSWUSA.com). BSW is an pro audio equipment distribution company, which services the broadcasting and podcasting industries.
As many of you know, I had to replace most of our studio equipment over the last month due to a break-in and burglary that we went through shortly before the holidays. I ordered a lot of equipment from BSW, and when I had a problem with some of the equipment, Karen Mayes in BSW’s Customer Service Department took very good care of me. She handled my return with professionalism and speed. I have been a BSW customer for several years now, and I highly recommend them.
I told you my great customer service story, what is yours? Who are you a raving fan of?
Tags: bsw, customer service, raving fans, returns
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Southwest Airlines.
On a 2006 Thanksgiving flight between San Diego and Oakland, I needed to entertain a cranky 4 year old. We constructed a collage using pictures from the in-flight magazine and some tape I had in my carry-on. SWA plane was the centerpiece, along with an Abraham Lincoln doll for the pilot (Skymall catalog), and several other characters we found. Whole thing was propped up on a wood stir stick stuck through the bottom of an inverted coffee cup.
Flight attendants were so tickled with this, they brought us “prizes” (a sick sack full of SWA-branded pens, playing cards, and other goodies they could find), comped my drinks (believe me, those were needed), and announced our achievement over the plane’s speakers. This amused me and thoroughly delighted the 4 year old… making what could have been a difficult trip into an exciting day and the highlight of the 4 year old’s Thanksgiving trip to her aunt’s house. Nothing else impressed her the entire time (much to her aunt’s chagrin).
That’s awesome! Very creative idea for in flight entertainment, and a great response from the Southwest staff!
A few years ago I went to Nordstrom’s to pick up two pairs of pants they were supposed to have shortened. When I arrived, the pants were nowhere to be found. The manager (who was more upset than I was over the mistake) found them — they had never been submitted for tailoring for some reason.
She not only put a rush on the hemmed pants but personally hand-delivered them — free of charge — to my home.
I’ve been a loyal customer every since.
You’re right on that our expectations of customer service have lowered. How many times have you received the wrong order at a McDonald’s and said, “Oh well, it’s McDonalds. What do you expect?”
My cool customer service story: I’ve just started the daunting task of searching for a home to buy. My daughter starts school this year so finding a home in the right school boundary is paramount. The only site I found to do this in Colorado is cohomefinder.com.
Their search is fantastic! You can search by almost any parameter you want. They also hooked me up with a nice realtor who has access to my saved searches. The extra bonus: I emailed them to report a bug on their site and they called me back within a week to tell me it would be fixed and to ask how my home search was going!
P.S. I have nothing against McDonald’s except that even though I don’t like their food, I still end up eating there at least 3 times a month.
My builder who is as handy with a hoover (vacuum) as he is with a hammer! He also gave me flowers to say thank you for the work. Unheard of. I’ll tell everyone!
The best Customer Service experience I’ve had was with one of our Vendors. AudioQuest Cables is a product we sell, and as a Marketer for our company I was trying to pull together some print materials for our customers from this Vendor. Instead of trying to re-invent the wheel so to say I contacted this Vendor to see what they had already printed. I was contacted same day by this company stating that all of their marketing materials are just via Web, and they didn’t have any “brochures or pdfs for me to use”. Then an hour later the CMO contacted me with my requirements for a Brochure. Then 2 hours later, they had the brochures in my e-mail for “My” approval, and an e-mail later an order of 100 in the mail to me. I was blown away that they cared that much about our “small” business to get those materials out to me as quickly as possible.