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Customer service - good or bad


peeriebryan
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I thought I'd start this thread after being amazed at how well I was treated by a business today

 

I ordered a bass guitar DVD from www.basscentre.com in London over 5 months ago. It was a spur of the moment buy (£17 via paypal) and I completely forgot about it. Unfortunately it didn't arrive, but my account was paypal account was debited. I only remembered about my order yesterday, so I sent them an email last night. There was a very polite reply in my inbox this morning with a phone number and contact name. I phoned the number, but the bloke was unavailable at the time. The guy I spoke to completely took my word that I'd paid for the DVD but it didn't arrive. He didn't check my account or ask any confirmation questions. All he said was "Don't worry, I take your word for it"

 

To my amazement, he took my name and address and promised to send out another DVD in the post today (I hope this one gets here). I go through a fair amount of bass guitar equipment, so they'll get the money they're out of pocket back in return business many times over

 

 

Anybody else have any customer service tales of joy or woe. Don't get me started about Tiscali...... :evil:

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Oringally posted here

 

Not quite a laptop fire but a laptop in a fire.

 

Just phoned up Fujitsu Siemens service centre yet again to try and figure out what the hell is going on with my laptop. 5 days turn around they said it would take on the 16th November. So off it went.

 

parts coming; parts ordered; parts coming; being fixed; engineer not sure if he was to go ahead; parts coming; can't get through; will chase up; parts coming; engineer fixing; parts coming etc. etc. ad nauseum.

 

Each time I was told it would be with me by the end of the week!

 

Now I phone up and the service centre has burned to the ground taking my laptop and 300+ others with it!! 8O

 

What really galled me was that I made an incredulous *punnph* *phummph* noise when I was being told about it as I couldn't believe what I was hearing! Then the guy on the phone started on me that I was callous and "did I not care that people might have been killed" and "did I know no-ne had been hurt" and to "stop laughing" !!

 

So I end up literally having a right royal slanging match with the guy down the phone over it all as I didn't find any humour in it at all and certainly wan't making laughing noises!!

 

We got to a point where our points were put across and I hung up! Wart :evil: ... and I didn't get his name!

 

Anyway .. I now have to wait a "couple of weeks" to get a replacement model or the model up!

 

Good job I took my hard disk out the thing before I sent it back is all I can say!

 

Further to this, they finally came back to me offering me a laptop as a replacement that in my opinion was of a lower grade to the one previous. I wrestled with them for some time to get an upgrade!

 

Then in waiting for the thing to be delivered I phoned up again to check it's whereabouts only to have a girl tell me that an engineer was "fixing my laptop now and that there were spare parts in transit that were needed before it could be fixed!"

 

I mean! :evil: "Yeah, right .. just you read me the standardised bollox off your card!" To say I was livid is an understatement! It just went to show the whole rest of the time I phoned it was just the same standardised crap I was being fed!!!

 

So I finally got my replacement laptop with a Core 2 Duo 2Ghz. First Intel based chipset I've had since 1998 :( Not convinced it's better than the AMD 64 4000+ I had previously .. core speed for starters!!, but I've given up the will to live where Fujitsu are concerned! Though the graphics are definetly better and it has more memory *sigh*

 

Last laptop that I'll ever buy! It's so much easier to build a computer yourself when you know you can replace parts yourself when things go awry!

 

I'm also feked off as I have a hard disk that had a tuned Gentoo 64 build on it for the previous laptop!! Grr!!

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Tales of woe? I have way too many to mention, besides, I'm sure I've posted the real depressing ones elsewhere on this forum already.

 

Tales of joyful customer service are, sadly, few and far between. However, as someone who deals with customers/clients every single day (although being old fashioned I still prefer to call them 'students'), I can testify that the motive for good customer service is not always altruism or a willingness to go the extra mile.

 

Allow me to Elaborate. Frequently students ask me for help recovering their lost data, which is almost entirely due to their own negligence. Having inadvertently lost many a document myself during my student days, I know what it feels like and will always try my best to help them. Some of my other colleagues, however, will at best tell them that the work is lost. At worst I've witnessed coworkers chastise the poor soul for not following backup procedures and then go on to tell them it's all gone and that's it's their own fault!

 

So, i guess you could say that some of my good customer service (if i do say so myself), stems from an empathy with the person in question. However, other actions which may be construed as GCS are actually little more than acts of laziness. EG, A student may ask me about his/her inability to print a document. Usually this is cos they haven't noticed that they've exceeded their print credit overdraft (don't ask), so they need to put more cash in. When this happens I'm supposed to give them a rather stern lecture on managing their account and then demand that they put some money into it before i enable their printing. Needless to say, i never do this. Instead I reset their account to 0 (giving them £2 to spend) and tell them to make sure they keep it topped up in future. It takes me a few seconds and is, as far as I'm concerned, mutually beneficial.

 

My point is that, perhaps in the case of Brian's DVD, the guy answering the phone just could not be arsed to contest the payment or to look back through months of records etc, so just thought it would be easier to send one off. I guess this is a form of GCS, but I dunno how much credit him (or indeed I) really deserve for it!

;)

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Viking Direct have possibly the best Customer Service I have ever encountered. I won't go into details but I was so impressed I dropped them an email to let them know (something I would rarely ever do). They then sent me a letter saying thank you and that they had printed off my email and put it on the staff notice board for all to see and as a gesture gave me a £5 voucher to use in future.

 

All for saying thanks. It is a strange world we live in.

 

Tales of woe, I am with Ally. Far too many to mention. BT are utterly hopeless. Sky aren't much better.

 

I find that the problem nowadays is cutbacks and competition. To compete you have to keep costs down. To do that you need to hire people at minimum wage or outsource to slave-labour countries. The people working there are glad of a job but very few have an interest in the subject they are talking about, never mind any qualifications in that area. They are given a set list of questions and answers. No different to a flow chart. These are usually written so that once a call has got to stage number 20 or 30 then the customer is told to go off and do something and call back. The customer takes their word for it and calls back only to be asked the same questions by somebody else. Very poor customer service. I wouldn't take my car to a mechanic that couldn't drive and pulled a laminated flow chart out of their pocket.

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My work is currently in the middle of outsourcing certain aspects of our operation to India. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it's not going all that well. We've recently moved the majority of correspondence relating to deceased customers out there and this has led to some interesting exchanges. One poor woman wrote to us explaining that her account would need to be changed as she had recently lost her husband. The reply she received confirmed that her account had been changed as requested and went on to add that we hoped that she would be successful in her ongoing search for him.

 

Although, in this case, at least she wasn't advised that we would need written authorisation from her late husband before such a change could be effected. 8O

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I agree Sky are terrible, Bank of Scotland are crap also.

 

I hate haveing to phone and go through a labyrinth of option then finally getting some foreginer on the phone I cannot understand and seems to not understand anything I am tell them.

 

I also hate buying things over the net/ phone etc and saying do they realise I stay in the Shetland Isles and will this effect it etc. They allways say no its all ok and then you get an email/phone call later o no they cant deliver or more money etc due to them finally realiseing where it is!

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Styles wrote

I also hate buying things over the net/ phone etc and saying do they realise I stay in the Shetland Isles and will this effect it etc. They always say no its all ok and then you get an email/phone call later o no they cant deliver or more money etc due to them finally realising where it is!

Reckon if that take your order (and your money) then if they discover that their carrier charges more to deliver to Shetland then that is just tough luck on them. If (as happened to me twice recently) there is no way to add the advertised surcharge onto my invoice at checkout then that again is tough.

 

I am the same with e-bay sellers with feedback up in the hundreds.....it is up to them to display delivery costs. I will double check with small sellers before bidding because when I am exploring e-bay I tend to be in a good mood.

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I find that the problem nowadays is cutbacks and competition. To compete you have to keep costs down. To do that you need to hire people at minimum wage or outsource to slave-labour countries. The people working there are glad of a job but very few have an interest in the subject they are talking about, never mind any qualifications in that area.

 

I think another problem without outsourcing is that the person answering the phone doesn't actually work for the company whos customer is doing the phoning. The result of that is firstly that the quality of their work is subject to less scrutiny, and secondly, that they have absolutely no loyalty to the company or their customers. We have work done for us in India, and the quality of work that comes from our own employees there is vastly better than that which is outsourced to a company there.

 

On a more positive note, the influx of Polish people into Edinburgh has seen the quality of customer service in a lot of places go through the roof. Where previously a miserable young school leaver would think themselves the unluckiest person alive to be working in a shop for £5/hour, and have the mood to match, the Poles are more than grateful for the opportunity and provide endless politeness and helpfulness.

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God help anyone purchasing anything that gets sent via a carrier that utilises Streamline!

 

I've nearly knawed my leg off waiting for 24Hr parcels to arrive a week later!!

 

Well, I nearly knawed my leg off in surprise when they delivered my iMac G5 (ooooh yes, baby!) to me out in the Westside on Sunday, Christmas Eve, when it was scheduled to arrive by UPS on the 27th.

 

I was happy, happy, happy!

 

On a bad note though, a certain older courier firm delivered a Hamleys parcel to me by throwing it over the gate, cardboard box and all. I phoned them up to "discuss" this and reminded them that I have goats and there could have been very little, if any, evidence of said cardboard box if I hadn't found their delivery.

 

Also, I have had stuff delivered in cars parked in the open hill track by my house, not necessarily mine as a courier could not be arsed to walk 100 yards to my house!

 

Also, I had coal delivered in the hill as the truckdriver was scared of my dogs (a skinny whippet/lurcher and a Bernese mountain dog - rug with fur) - who had ran up to say hello! He climbed into the back of his cab, onto the flatbed and chucked the coal out and went back to the depot!

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John Lewis were excellent. When in Shetland, I managed to break a radio I bought from them. I sent them an email, and within 10 minutes they had replied with an address to send it to. Within just over a week I had a replacement.

 

I found Vodaphone customer service pretty good too, lot better than O2.

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Frances144 wrote

Also, I had coal delivered in the hill as the truckdriver was scared of my dogs (a skinny whippet/lurcher and a Bernese mountain dog - rug with fur) - who had ran up to say hello! He climbed into the back of his cab, onto the flatbed and chucked the coal out and went back to the depot!

 

Now be fair to the guy........all dogs have teeth and can bite the unwary. And it would not be much consolation for the driver after he got out of hospital to be told he should have sounded his horn and waited. I would be more cautious about the whippet/lurcher than the Bernese but to anyone at all worried about dogs the Bernese would be frightening.

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