I’ve had several very interesting interactions with my service providers over the last year. Honestly, I wish I didn’t have to call them, tweet them or or do otherwise to ask about my service. I think that in general, the less you call your service provider to get support, the better the service is and therefore the customer service gets better since companies can concentrate on rewarding their customers. This is something very few companies do and to my surprise, Citibank did it this year. They actually made me feel like they actually care by giving me a better interest rate and actively calling me to congratulate me on my outstanding payment record. But I digress.
I’ve had very memorable (both good and bad) with my service providers and I am going to give you a quick run down of what happened and what I did to get better customer service from them. In some cases it was successful and in some others it wasn’t. I will look at AT&T, United and Minted. I recommend you look at the United story for things you can do. This is beyond social media.
Minted.
Great: They are great. As simple as that. We (my wife) ordered our holiday cards and through the process many personal things happened that did not allow us the time to take our family picture. At the beginning, Minted sent reminder emails to my wife almost every day. They were polite and personal messages reminding her to submit the family picture. As it so happens with family pictures, we needed time and a whole lot of self-encouragement to take it. It took us 953 takes to get a usable image that we can mail in.
The deadline was rapidly approaching for us to get our cards on time and Minted stepped us the polite harassment and started calling us to nicely remind us about it. When we finally got the image, we were not able to upload it directly thourgh the website so we emailed them two options and they got back to us right away. They said they took care of uploading it and even got the designer involved to give us advice on which image goes better with the card we chose.
Simply fantastic. Their website ushered my wife through the process and when the website failed they were there to provide quick and efficient support to help us achieve our goal.
Robert Scoble has written about TinyPrints and their level of customer service. I have not tried TinyPrints but I surely can assert that Minted takes the Altamirano customer service recognition for the year. Robert you should check them out.
AT&T
Good (with some hiccups): Much has been written about AT&T this year. Fake Steve Jobs wrote a wonderful piece about what it means for a cellular company that has the luck to carry the iPhone exclusively, to ask their users to stop using the device so much because it causes the network to choke. Overall, my experience with AT&T has not been that bad. I happen to live right across from an AT&T cellular tower which affords us excellent coverage at home and since most of this year I’ve worked from home, my coverage has been outstanding.
Gizmodo says that the 3G internet coverage that ATT provides is the fastest in the nation according to their tests across 12 cities and several locations.
When we get outside of the Silicon Valley (Michigan) it is almost impossible to rely on ATT. We usually just accept that our iPhones are not going to be working for the time we are traveling. That’s why we make sure to have an internet connection nearby to that we can use the rest of the functions on the iPhone.
United:
Horrible: It is no secret that the airlines have possibly the worst customer service across many industries but this year United’s customer service was so so bad that it drove us to extreme measures to fix it. They are listed below. But before you read them, let me give you the background story.
We were going to fly to Michigan on a determined date. A few days before that date, the kids got extremely sick. They ended up at the ER in the middle of the night and were diaognosed with a very contagious virus (not swine flu) that might be easy to spread in an airplane of all places. We requested to United Airlines that they would let us fly a couple of days later so that we don’t put the health of our kid and the passenger’s in danger by exposing them to a contagious virus. After many hours and two days of calls they finally realized they didn’t have a health policy that would allow them to change the flight and not charge us exorbitant fees. They offered to change the flights at a cost of $150 change fee plus $2,450 fare change. That was ridiculous.
By the third day, we changed our strategy. We used their same techniques.
- We also recorded the conversation for quality purposes on the iPhone. This changed the tone of the conversation and they were not as rude as before. Do this and see how our customer service calls change.
We got no results., but that put my wife into action. She did the following that you can also do:
- Report it to your local station. They will pick it up and investigate it and if there are more cases like yours then they will run the story
- Report it to your congress person and senator. They have staff devoted to looking into this kind of issues.
- Don’t ever ever fly with them again and make sure to write a blog post, a facebook note or a tweet explaining the problem
United never responded. See the tweets below. @UnitedAirlines never responds to complaints on Twitter.
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One of my favorite customer service quotes is “One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth doing is what we do for others.” -LEWIS CAROL
It applies perfectly to customer service. Thanks for stopping by!
when establishing a business, a good customer service is always necessary*,`