Good customer service

[Rufus Stone]

Hopefully this doesn't break the rules.

I bought a Gtech hedge trimmer last November. On receipt I opened the box to check nothing was damaged and then put away.

Got it out today and powered up the battery. Due to my stupidity I couldn't connected it all together though. So called them.

A couple of automated levels and then the help line was answered within a couple of rings. Within 30 seconds they resolved my stupidity and it's now all connected.

So rare these days that I felt praise was appropriate, which was also given to the call handler at the time.

[mcflurry]

Weber had great customer service when I bought a barbecue.

The first time using it was a disaster, so they went through the setup as a beginner looking at the air routes, location of the charcoal, timings etc.

[richhead]

Quite sad reflection that people feel the need to remark when they have had good customer service.
I should be the given not the exception.

[Tango13]

richhead said:

Quite sad reflection that people feel the need to remark when they have had good customer service.
I should be the given not the exception.

Indeed, I once wanted to contact the head office of a chain store to tell them just how good a particular branch was. The only way I could find to contact them was via their complaints portal so I had to fill in a complaint form with 'This is not a complaint!' as the subject matter.

[Spare tyre]

I worked for a small old school IT consultancy

Customers could ring, email, fax, smoke signal us with issues

We’d call them back, cart wheel, drive etc to get the issue sorted out within minutes

Happy customers, happy profits

We got purchased by a large slow moving beast

Now when a customer emails in, a simple question will cause 3 weeks of arguing over which cost centre etc and they never get a timely answer

I didn’t realise how good we were until we were not - sad to see

[bergclimber34]

I have to say the majority of the time you get acceptable customer service, you sometimes get very good.

The last few times I have very good were John Lewis and actually Thames Water who were excellent.

JL replaced an ordered item even though it was probably lost in transit from the packaging, no questions asked and after trying and failing to get any help from Royal Mail who supposedly delivered it.

And Thames Water hen I had a leak, they were very helpful, quick, prompt and offered apologies for a problem that was a crap landlord not them

[K87]

Best service I have had was from a German sat nav maker. The sat nav stopped working, they organised a courier, repaired it and sent it back within a week, no charge.

Item was 4 years old and I suspect it was my fault it failed, all for a £100 item.

[KAgantua]

Octopus are amazing

I remember i was with both edf and scpttish power before

Never answered phone in under an hour

[DorsetSparky]

Excellent customer service in no particular order:

- Starling bank
- Plusnet
- Kewtech

Really the only three companies who consistently deliver fantastic customer service.

[Sporky]

Spare tyre said:

I didn’t realise how good we were until we were not - sad to see

Similar. We used to focus on quality and looking after customers; profit followed. Got bought, now we focus on profit, and don't make as much.

[OldGermanHeaps]

I used to work for a small security firm that got bought by a multinational driven by american bankers, customer service went down the toilet, along with job satisfaction, and any attempts to meet our customers needs were thwarted by "process" and short term profit at all costs.
Funnily enough loads of customers left and we went from being very profitable to making a loss.
Now I run a security company and an IT related company we gear everything toward exceeding customer expectations and profit follows naturally. We choose our suppliers based on aftersales support, but we do have to sack the odd couple of customers who chose to be difficult and impossible to please.
As far as suppliers go, one example is access control. There are cheaper companies than paxton, there are some systems that have more features than paxton, but the support from paxton for any of their products, no matter where or how you obtained their products, whether you are a multinational, a one man band installer or even an end user who never purchased their product it doesn't matter, their level of support is fanatical.

Edited by OldGermanHeaps on Sunday 13th April 19:32