In the past few days, I've had to deal with customer service/tech support on three separate, unrelated occasions.
Two times it was stuff that just went wrong, at no fault of theirs, that I needed help with. Both of those people were excellent. They were helpful and sounded thrilled to be helping me. One (at the local internet provider) actually sounded like I had rescued her from boredom.
Both of these customer service/tech support people solved my problems and then actually offered to go above and beyond their jobs with extra assistance. If every customer support experience were like this I wouldn't dread calling them.
The third experience was a little different.
I was calling their attention, by email, to an expensive mistake they'd made. A mistake in my favor. They acted as though I was to blame, and I had to ask to be reimbursed for the direct expense their mistake had cost me. They tried to weasel out of reimbursing me, saying they had "no way to do that". They punished me for their mistake. I wasn't impressed.
How you interact with customers makes a huge difference in how customers feel about the business you work for. The business you represent. I now have good feelings about two businesses, and a bad feeling about another.
I'm not going to put the companies' names out there, but if anyone asks me specifically about my opinion of any of those companies, any time in the future, you know which ones I'll say good things about and which one I won't.
