Service satisfaction

When someone says the words “customer service,” I think the usual reaction is an involuntary… When someone says the words “customer service,” I think the usual reaction is an involuntary shudder and cringe of terror. Probably just about everyone has had some sort of terrible experience with customer service or technical support, whether it was waiting on hold for four hours, only to be disconnected, or sent the wrong product, only to be charged for it later.

So when I cracked the screen on my phone a few weeks ago, I wasn’t optimistic. I hadn’t actually done anything wrong; the LCD actually froze in the cold weather and cracked itself. I’d had the phone for less than three months, so I was disappointed to have the lower half of the display all messed up. Luckily, I was still under the three-month warranty, but I still wasn’t confident.

Part of my lack of optimism stemmed from a similar experience I’d gone through involving a computer several years ago. My computer’s display had been defective, but instead of offering to fix it for us, the computer company shipped us a new LCD panel and made us install it ourselves, which meant taking it to a computer store and having them do it for us.

Long story short, three weeks and several hundred dollars in labor later, I had a functional computer, but also severely damaged faith in the human race. Wouldn’t it have been smarter for the computer company to send me a box so that I could send it back to them and let them fix it themselves? I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that it was a severe annoyance and a bad customer service experience, and I’ve never bought another computer from that company because I never want to deal with its terrible service bureaucracy again. And this doesn’t even touch on all the times I’ve had to wait on hold for hours on end just so some irate and overworked employee with a completely incomprehensible accent can act haughtily superior to me for half an hour while walking me through a technical problem more complex than most astrophysics calculations.

“You need to open the Start menu,” the employee will say. “What?” I’ll respond, since it sounded like she said, “You breed for happen the fart men.” “START MENU,” she yells back. And so on.

But anyway, back to my phone issue. So with low expectations, I took my phone to my carrier’s store and showed it to one of the floor people, who handed me off to another person who took my phone and examined it. I braced myself for some sort of complicated legal explanation of why my phone didn’t qualify for warranty replacement, but instead he just looked it over for a second and said, “OK, you should be fine. We’ll get you set up for a replacement here.”

And what followed was the most helpful, pleasant and enjoyable customer-service experience I’ve ever had. The guy asked me for my account info, printed out a receipt for me and arranged for a replacement phone to be sent to my house for absolutely no charge. When it came in the mail, I took it back down to the store, showed both the new one and old broken one to another salesperson and got the new one activated and synched with no fuss at all.

I was amazed. Where was all the hassle, the fussing around? I hadn’t had to argue with a single service rep over a long distance phone call, or pay an exorbitant fee for a piece of hardware I’d already sent back. This wasn’t customer service; it was people being genuinely helpful. Needless to say, I was impressed.

Before I get too gushy, allow me to say that I’ve still had a few problems with my cell phone carrier, but this whole deal completely changed my view of them. No longer did they seem like an ugly, evil telephone supermonster that trampled pathetic humans underfoot. They’re actually nice people. They smile a lot and let you play with all the phones on the walls while you’re waiting, and the store I visited is right across from a Cold Stone, a fact that I took full advantage of when I was there.

In other words, I’ve realized that customer service doesn’t have to be a horrible, awful experience.

Sometimes it can be friendly and helpful and human. The only thing is that now, every time something breaks or stops functioning, I’m going to expect to be treated like an actual human being.

Personally I don’t think that that’s too unrealistic an expectation, but obviously a lot of companies disagree.

But it also means I’m not going to settle for being treated like an annoyance anymore. My cell phone carrier showed me how nice people can be, and now I’m going to make sure they stay that way.

If you’ve got some customer service horror stories – or fairy tales – tell Richard about them at rab53@pitt.edu.