Image via CrunchBaseI got my first job when I was 15 years old. It was in retail. At a very early age, I was instilled with an ethic to provide good customer service to our customers. In most of my positions over my career, I have had to perform some level of customer service.It has been ingrained into my psyche what is, and consequently what isn't, good customer service. As such, I have high expectations of how I expect to be treated if I am the customer. I know how I would treat customers, and I expect to be treated the same way.
These days, unfortunately, it is harder and harder to find quality customer service. If I am in a place of business, and I receive what I perceive to be shoddy customer service, I do not hesitate to lodge my complaints with management. By the same token, if I encounter what I consider customer service that I consider meets or exceeds my expectations, I want to talk about it.
We picked our son up from school yesterday. He was pretty excited about an upcoming Christmas party that his school was going to have next week. When we got home, he asked ,e to burn him copies of some Christmas CDs that we had bought for him last year. One of which I had saved on my current laptop (it has become my custom to rip a copy of any CD that we buy from him since he tends to break them) but the other was going to be a problem.
The second CD was called "60 Christmas Carols for Kids" that I purchased as a digital download from Amazon.com last year. Unfortunately, I had those MP3s saved to an older laptop and an external hard drive, both of which have crashed in the past 6 months. (Remind me to start making backups of my backups.) I contacted Amazon customer service through their website, informed them of the situation, and asked if there was any way to allow me to re-download the files.
I received an email from them in less than 12 hours informing me that they had reinstated the option to download all of my previous MP3s that I had purchased from them. Since the original purchase was over a year ago, I fully expected that they would not be able to help me. Tonight I have downloaded all of the files that I needed, and burned them onto a couple of CDs for my son.
In today's day and age, it has become increasingly difficult to find good customer service. My experience has shown it is even more difficult to find it in larger companies. I want to publicly thank Amazon.com for helping me out in this situation, and making it much easier to provide my son with the CDs he wanted.
It's nice to know that Amazon is striving to give good customer service. One of the qualities probably that makes Amazon sell.
ReplyDeleteThis was very good of them to do, and I hope more businesses will strive to follow their example. Do you think that much of our current rude customer service may have been started by the Soup Nazi and his, "No soup for you," line on Seinfeld?
ReplyDeleteLOL Fish. I never thought of that. Perhaps, but I kind of felt it was slipping before that.
ReplyDelete