Welcome to the first annual Customer Service Awards. These awards reward good customer service with excellent word of mouth and free advertising on a world famous webpage.
Today’s first winner has been in the queue for the longest. Tice-n-Teiss realty were nominated for their friendly and courteous manner when using them as a purchasing realtor. While the purchase was made exactly one year ago last Sunday, the friendly handwritten note that was received on the anniversary was a welcome reminder. of the wonderful experience they made buying a condo. Jeffery Tice was the most laid back, and yet helpful agent the award committee has ever met. I’m well aware that Jeff just wants to have us refer friends to him to sell their places (in fact, he mentioned it in the note), however, because of the great customer service received, I definitely will for all the right reasons. Kudos to the TnT team for a well deserved award!
The second customer service award goes to Cables Unlimited. They not only make a number of great products, but when one of them had problems with a committee member’s new Palm PDA, they shipped out a free new cable that was compatible without even asking for the old one back. Well done, CablesUnlimited! (Anybody want a free palm universal connector USB sync charge cable? Works with anything that has the standard connector except the T2, apparently)
The third, and more dubious “you almost suck” customer service award goes to UPS for the entirely unhelpful customer service rep I spoke to today. Erhm, that is, for the committee’s experience with their customer support. A package was mistakenly addressed to my home instead of office and so I called to change it to a will-call (you know, like with tickets?), which I was told by a friend who works there was possible. The ever so unhelpful chap on the phone told me that there was no way they could do that until the package was scanned and put on the truck. Which sorta defeats the purpose. So they pretty much guarantee that they’re going to waste that driver’s time instead of somehow getting the package tagged before it’s taken out and a failed delivery attempt is made to my empty home. Fortunately, a good friend is a manager at the local station and gave me the number to the local office (which, interestingly enough, the normal 800 customer support rep was so very unhelpfully unable to provide) who promptly took care of the problem. Worst award narrowly avoided.
Finally, a great big WORST** CUSTOMER SERVICE ever award goes to ISS for changing their newest version of Internet Scanner in such a way that a rather important usage of the product at the University of Florida was impossible. Of course, that alone doesn’t earn you this award, no, you have to follow it up by having your technical support staff be utterly useless except to say, “yeah, it doesn’t work now, sorry”
**No, not really, I’ve had much worse customer service experiences, this one is just on my mind lately.
See, good customer service is worth it. Good publicity. I’d highly endorse using the services of the award winning recipients any day.
R.I.P. Wantingseed.com
04/14/04
Left by Colin on April 14th, 2004
Wow, just had a phenominal customer service experience with Belkin. A cord on my pda is freying and I called up their support to see if I could get the part replaced and they told me the pda has a lifetime guarantee and they’d ship it out, getting it here tuesday.
The person on the phone was incredibly nice about it too. Very pleasant experience.
Left by Jordan on April 23rd, 2004