Good Customer Service?
Like many others who pursue careers in computer science I am a relatively cynical person and I have reached a point where I generally never expect good service - especially when not paying some premium for it. There are times when the free/included customer service is great and when that happens I am genuinely surprised and grateful and in most cases become a long term customer and walking advertisement for the provider of that service.
This week I have been a pretty surprised person as I have received exceptional service twice from two different companies.
CostaRicaProducts.com
I ordered some Shade Grown Organic Coffee from here after tasting it by chance during a company excursion a few weeks back. I am no coffee connoisseur by any stretch but this coffee is fantastic. It is incredibly smooth, almost no bitterness, and has a really nice after taste. In any case, I ordered it from this random website because they had better prices and lower shipping fees than the coffee grower’s own website.
A week after ordering the coffee (ordered it for the office) it had not shown up. I fired off a message to the support email that was easily found on the site and received a timely, friendly response from a real person that immediately said the order should not have taken so long and sent me another bag of coffee with faster shipping no questions asked. They even took the time to tell me a bit about how they do things, some new product they would be getting in from Costa Rica the following week, and wished me well. WTF is that all about? I expected an automated “please allow more time for the order to be received” or some such. I will be buying more coffee from here.
Shure
I use Shure earbuds at work. I wear them all day and they are awesome. A year or two ago Tejus and Hamed convinced me to buy them despite them being a bit pricey.
Recently the cords of the earbuds had started splitting up near the ear ends. It was a kind of spiraling separation that started as a tiny hole and grew to about a half inch total length wrapping around the cords. Given that these things just sit on my desk and are never moved or traveled with this seemed unusual even after 2ish years of heavy use. Once I got a mild pop from them when the exposed wiring hit my ear.
I went to the Shure website and filed a support question, not expecting much, just wondering if I could get them repaired somehow. The first response seemed like an automatic thing and said my question was being forwarded to the “VP of Quality Assurance.” I immediately thought “yeah right” and forgot about it. But, a few days later they actually called me, talked to me about the issue, and then offered to send me a brand new pair of the newer version. They also covered the shipping for me to send my pair with the tear in them back.
I was already a walking advertisement for Shure because the earbuds sound excellent and passively block almost all noise. They obviously stand behind their stuff given the above and whenever I do buy a new pair they will most certainly be Shure brand.
Conclusion
In both of the above cases I felt I had legitimate reasons to request assistance, the responses were just pleasantly unusual. It makes me wonder what my company is like to deal with as a customer. We essentially have two layers of customers - the organizations we sell the service to and their end users that interact with it and we support both layers. I feel that given our limited resources we do a pretty good job, in some cases hurting our overall efficiency a bit to take wide detours to service custom requests and address corner cases, but I wonder if we could do it better. It feels a little different given that both of the above involved physical product while our offering is all software but I am sure there are things we could do to both provide better service and be more efficient about it.