customer support
If the Online Shoe Shopping Fits…
Because I have a somewhat odd shoe size - 10 AAA (recently widened from AAAA, but fortunately not lengthened) I order most of my shoes on line. This is a bit chancy, of course, but mostly I know what’s going to work and what’s not. And you can always send them back.
Last weekend, I spent [...]
Customer service: don’t be like the big guys. Please.
The other day I was part of a conversation about how small business want to offer the kinds of web functionality that the big guys have - online customers support and ordering, that sort of thing. It occurred to me later, though, that in my experience, small businesses tend to do a far better job [...]
Spitting bullets at word-spotting
Let’s face it, I don’t know anybody who enjoys calling into a call center.
Yes, sometimes we’re calling to order something, and we generally get a very pleasant person - say , some nice women up in Maine who works for LL Bean is really trying to help me figure out whether the Swimming Pool blue [...]
Thinking through the customer contact process
Without going into all of the particulars, or naming names, I’ve been having a minor back-and-forth and with my health insurance provider.
Now, I first have to say that, overall, the service from this insurance provider has been excellent. They pay our doctors’ and hospital bills promptly, don’t seem to reject things willy-nilly, provide very clear [...]
Nice Touch from Jet Blue
God knows, Jet Blue has gotten some pretty bad publicity in the last year - mainly stemming from their mega-delays last February, delays that required a major mea culpa on their part.
So I thought I’d give them a small kudos - a kudo? a kudeen? a kudette? - for their recent follow-up to me and [...]
Let us give props to Best Buy and the Geek Squad
A week ago Saturday, tired of keeping my HP laptop going by holding the overheating and poorly working power jack in at just the right angle, and worrying about whether the whole thing was going to turn into a not so towering inferno, I decided to get a new laptop.
Off to Best Buy I took [...]
T-Mobile Declares Customer Support Bankruptcy
A while back I heard the phrase “email bankruptcy,” which describes the state some people reach when their inbox contains thousands of messages that they simply cannot cope with. The mere sight of it is paralyzing, and so sometimes people simply “declare bankruptcy” and delete them all - then send a message to everyone in [...]
Jacked by the HP Power Jack Problem
I am, of course, old enough to be nostalgic for the good old days when things lasted. Sure, they’d break, but that’s when you had them repaired - because you weren’t going to just toss away something that still had some life in it - especially given that the the cost of repairing something was [...]
A Simple Technology Rule: Use it to Talk to Customers
This seems obvious, right? We’ve got all of this old technology (like phones), not so new technology (email, your web site), and cutting-edge stuff (social networks) available, and so we should use it to improve communications with our customers. Improvement means not just talking in more ways, but more useful ways. We can make it [...]
Why Doesn’t Everyone Do This?
Mobile phones are highly personal objects, and as a result, getting a new one - no matter how great it is - can be traumatic in some ways. You have a lot to relearn. How do I add that person to my contacts? How do I swap calls when I get another call coming in? [...]
