Your Verizon woes reminded me of one of many good experiences I have had with T-mobile. I needed to replace a broken phone and the one I wanted was on sale online. The online order process somehow got messed up and I was without the phone 2 days later. I was on the phone with customer service trying to straighten out the order and they suggested I go to the nearby T-mobile store and buy the phone there. The sale price was only available online, not at the store, so the customer service rep credited my account $50 (the difference) and told me to go buy the phone at the store.
Always great customer service at Publix (my son works there )
Are there any businesses that actually answer their phones anymore with a human being? I hate going through the “press #1 for this, press #2 for that” nonsense. Then you get another phone tree of pressing various numbers.
Funny part is, one of the worst places for customer service these days used to be the best. My wife and I years ago walked into a WalMart outside of Harrisburg, PA (they didn’t exist where I live), and we were amazed, they had people in the various departments, if you asked for something they would help you find it, the departments were neat and well organized, it was a pleasure to shop there…now WalMart has joined the bottom of the barrel like K Mart shudder and the like.
One thing that may no longer have good customer relations is Craftsmen tools. With their hand tools (their main line, they have a so called green line of cheap tools this doesn’t apply to), if they ever break, they replace them, no question asked, at any sears store. I broke a ratchet that likely is older than I am, and walked into a sears, boom, had a new one, no jiving me about receipts, the age of it, etc. Sears just sold it to Stanley Tools, and I would expect based on what Stanley turned into (another purveyor of cheaply made tools made in China), that likely that policy will likely either go the way of the dinosaur, or they will make it impossible to get a replacement easily.
I purchased a kitchen scale at a national chain of stores, went home, opened it, and found that not only was it used, it wasn’t even cleaned off! Went back to the store for an easy return and, after stating that I could no longer be a customer of the store, was asked 2x if I wanted to exchange the item. Great listening skills. I still wonder if a health regulation was broken.
Occasionally, but generally no and some are definitely worse than others…
What kills me is when I do all the “pressing” including putting my account number or other identifying information and the first thing they ask when they come on is “What is your account number?” Ugh! Why did I press all those buttons?!
Cablevision (Optimum now I guess, hard to keep track of the changes in nomenclature) has never let me down with respect to my TV and cable service. The wait times on the phone are blissfully brief and the customer service reps are unfailingly polite, helpful and effective. When a service visit is scheduled, they keep you advised of the tech’s progress toward your home and always show up within the designated window of time. They deserve a special round of applause for a recent experience. I had bought a new sectional couch for my family room, and the configuration required that the whole room be re-arranged, so the cabling for the TV be re-routed to another wall. After completing the job, the tech, unasked, insisted on moving the big, heavy TV and the console it rested on to the new location and re-connecting the spaghetti of cables for the various electronics. (I must have looked woefully incapable of handling the job.) I tipped him, but had to restrain myself from hugging him too!
I LOVE my local CVS pharmacy! They are unfailingly polite and helpful. They even let my dad know that he already had a flu shot for the year so they wouldn’t give him a 2nd one! They also are good about running the copay several different ways to find the lowest out of pocket expense for me and my family with the same active medication. It is great to have a place to trust with my medications. Best of all, they told me that I and my extended family are one of the reasons their number of prescriptions filled are so high and they are entitled to and will be getting more staff for their store!
I also love our Costco optical shop. They are much better than the other store that has slightly higher volume. The staff is very competent and cheerful, making sure your glasses fit properly and are appropriate for your face shape. They also give you the best prices they can.
Unfortunately, I’m still in the midst of resolving matters related to my divorce, because my ex-husband has been sitting on some documents for several months and hasn’t signed them and returned them to the financial services organization. I called the investment advisor for what seems like the umpteenth time today and asked if the particular documents could be reissued and re-sent to my ex-h. He said yes and he also said that he would be willing to take the documents to my ex-h and get them signed on the spot, the next time he’s in that city visiting his own parents. That’s 150 miles away. I’m crying now because this guy is so nice.
My mother and a group of friends were eating lunch at a local restaurant. The salad course arrived, and then it was taking a long, long time for the main course to arrive. Finally they asked someone, and learned that their waiter had quit the job in the middle of serving them lunch.
My husband just stayed at the Hilton in San Jose. We stay at Hiltons often, for work and pleasure, and they always are very classy and treat us well. He and his first officer showed up at the hotel at 8PM, earlier than the scheduled 2AM. The manager refused to allow them to check in early, because hey, he could theoretically sell those rooms for those 5 hours (hotel was not full). Basically, it sounds like the guy was purely being a jerk, because he could. Making them sit around, waiting in the lobby for several hours late in the evening, though the rooms were clean and available.
I think so many times when you get crappy treatment, it’s not the businesses fault, but individuals who have their own problems of bad attitude or power trips. If people don’t complain, nothing gets done about it.
A few years ago, I bought a Canada Goose parka from one of their retailers. I found it for the lowest price there. The company is called Gorsuch and they are out of Colorado.
Last year my daughter decided to get one since she had to walk through some rough weather for her various clinical jobs as a nurse.
I got a promotional email from them that offered 25% off everything. She took advantage of the sale and ordered one. Then they called her back to tell her that they were no allowed to sell that brand at a discount . She was mad about it because she had only that much in her budget and couldn’t afford it . She cancelled the order. Then a manager sent her an apologetic email with a voucher for the price difference so that she could get the parka.
I think that was the right thing to do, but it doesn’t seem like a lot of companies provide that kind of service.
I also agree that LL Bean has awesome customer service
@quantmech:
OMG! That story reminds me of something that happened more than a few years ago, my wife and I were in Montauk and were having breakfast in this little diner out there (a true old fashioned diner). Anyway, when we went to order breakfast the waitress told us the cook had quit, so they could do basic stuff like toast and cereal. I forget what we had, but what I will never forget is when the owner showed up, this big bald guy with tattoos, very biker looking, and everyone in the place roared when he said “I can’t wait until he comes to pick up his last pay check” with a big grin on his face.
Optimum does give decent service, at least in my area, for example I was having a lot of trouble with my internet access at one point (when they offered 15 meg only), I was getting like 4,5 meg, when the service guy came out he upgraded me to the cable router they use for higher speed service, it was on a different frequency, and it helped me get good service. Anytime I have had problems their tech support helped me figure it out over the phone, or they came out and fixed it and did it on time, and the people are routinely nice (helps their customer service is not offshore, it is local).
The “press 1 for x, press 2 for y” in the customer service industry is how they balance cost to serve you - typical call with an agent costs about $5-7 and if they can get you to serve yourself for $1 - hey they are going to do it! my company also outsources abroad for probably half of our calls - that saves money too but often at the expense of the customer experience. My job is managing that customer satisfaction survey - so complain there and also praise those agents that do good - it’s a hard low paying job, lots of kids going to college part time, moms balancing kids and work and others who just left military. I feel for them but I feel for customers who don’t get the service they deserve - it’s all corporate profit related.
That’s helpful, @amandakayak. I do like our local pharmacy and prefer talking with a person. I also like the credit cards where I can talk with someone in the US instead of being routed who knows where.
@amandakayak:
Not to mention that by having that 'press 1 for this", then given a submenu of x items, and so forth, they figure a certain percentage of customers will give up in frustration. The problem is as you say, companies view customer service as an expensive frill, and since so few companies give good customer service, it isn’t like people have many alternatives. It reminds me of the US auto industry in the so called ‘golden age’ (before competition), they didn’t care about quality or safety, they claimed ‘customers don’t care about that’, when the reality was since the big three all were the same with quality or safety, there was no advantage to doing either (Mercedes and Volvo both emphasized safety, but they were upscale fringe players, safety happened because of government regulations, and quality because people finally saw what cars could be when they started buying Japanese cars for their fuel efficiency, and realized a car didn’t have to die before 100,000 miles).
@QuantMech; Lol. Your story reminded me of a time I used to be in customer service for a shampoo manufacturer. My best and largest distributor ordered a truckload of hotel amenities that would ship from Mississippi to his warehouse in San Francisco. Ten days later I got a call from him asking about his shipment of shampoo and soap that hadn’t arrived. I tracked it down and finally discovered why it hadn’t made it to the West Coast.
It turned out we gave his load to a trucker who took his wife with him on these cross-country hauls. Somewhere between Mississippi and California the two of them pulled into a truck stop and began talking. It was there that they chose to have a knockdown drag out fight that ended in the two of them abandoning their payload and both heading in different directions for parts unknown. In other words, they left the truck behind and high tailed it out of there!
Every other customer of mine would have had a conniption and began cursing my company and me. They would have threatened to sue us and demanded we next day air hundreds of cases of products at our expense. But this man calmly asked me how quickly could we get another shipment to him. I made sure we got his delivery to him in 3 or 4 days using a team of drivers from our best carrier. Customers like him I could never do enough for. That’s how it should be.
ugg, I LOVE Amazon. I placed 159 orders in 2016. I think, “oh I need vitamin D” and just order it from them. So imagine my irritation when I have not yet received 3 items ordered on Jan 12. At least 75% of that was from the weather so “oh well”. However, our neighborhood has been clear for a week now.
I called yesterday and the guy called USPS (of course–just the worst) and all three were to be delivered today.
Nothing arrived. I called and the gal spent a long time figuring things out. We decided to have a new order as if same day delivery at no extra expense. BUT!!! I will not receive this order until Monday the 23rd. All were placed on Jan. 12th.
I told her/asked her to make sure that her managers understand than I never ever want my order to be USPS.
This is more under the heading of employees behaving badly than poor customer service. I worked at a retail store similar to The Gap in college. Minimum wage, crappy hours… we all did that at some point, right? Years later I had lunch with a coworker from back in the day who commented that all the employees there shoplifted on a regular basis. What?! That had never entered my mind as a possibility.
Wow, shoplifting by employees has not occurred to me either, though it happens so much it is called “shrinkage,” I believe and varies by store. Abercrombie has cameras on its employees 24/7, I believe. Probably other stores do as well.
I had a girlfriend who briefly worked at Joanns over the holidays and it sounded like the employees were basically frisked (plus purse examined) every day.
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