What Makes for Good Customer Service?

(www.bizchicksrule.com) — Customer service is about making your customers feel good about spending their money with you, good enough to want to do it over and over, and to tell others how good they feel about it. Customer service is about solving problems, making the customer’s life easier, and fixing problems when they arise. Unfortunately, not everyone gets that concept.

Over the last 8 months or so, my husband and I have been dealing with a customer service nightmare surrounding a big-ticket purchase he made in January. I’m not going to name the product or the company, but I do want to tell you about the experience because I think it’s valuable.

After doing lots of research and picking just the right item from just the right retailer, we drove six hours — in the snow, pulling a borrowed trailer — to Pennsylvania to pick up the purchase, only to be rushed out of the store as soon as we handed over the check. The $16,000 check. And did I mention that the person we were dealing with was the owner? Gee, way to represent your company. We should have known then that there would be problems.

Then, about a month after we got it home, there was a serious problem with the new purchase. We took it in for service, which required borrowing a trailer and driving another 3 hours total, and got it back six weeks later with the same problem. Repeat ad nauseam, for about 6 months. Insert an obnoxious service provider who got indignant when we pointed out that the problem wasn’t fixed. Still not fixed. Nope, not fixed!

Finally, we called the North American headquarters of the company that makes the product to complain about the situation. At first, they were extremely helpful. But after a short while, they stopped returning calls and e-mails, and got snarky when we actually did talk to them. It was baffling, and incredibly frustrating. As my husband put it when describing his loss of faith in the company, "It’s like finally meeting your childhood hero in person and finding out that he’s a douchebag who beats his wife and doesn’t take care of his kids." Yes, it was that bad.

After what seemed like endless back and forth, we finally reached a resolution: The company will replace the product free of charge. Nothing for the time lost, the frustration, the gas spent traveling back and forth, the fact that we’ve been paying for a product for 8 months and it’s spent more than half that time either "in the shop" or waiting to go to the shop.

Despite the fact that the company ultimately did the right thing (kind of, sort of, halfway maybe), it wasn’t exactly the kind of experience that leaves you feeling warm and fuzzy. We definitely won’t be making another purchase from them in the future, nor will we recommend them to anyone else. And we shudder to think what will happen if the item needs to be serviced again. Will it be more of the same nightmare?

I started this post talking about what customer service should be. But here’s what it was in this situation: More problems than we started with; no support in resolving the issue; people who made it seem like our fault that they created an inferior product and did a crappy job fixing it; making us dread ever dealing with the company or its affiliates again; feeling like we were walked all over. When you just spent $16,000, you don’t want to feel that way.

How do you keep your customers happy? What is the most important thing to you about customer service?

Contents © Copyright 2008 Kristen King

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