In praise of good customer service

In praise of good customer service

For the most part, customer service gets a bad rap, we usually have something to complain about, and good service more often than not, goes unspoken. I learned my customer service skills at the hands of the Walt Disney Company, so I would say I have a higher standard then most. So last week when I had to “over the top” (that’s Disney speak for good) customer service experiences, in the same day no less, I felt an obligation to share.

Disclaimer, I should explain that both of these are unsolicited, and beautiful wife and I paid full price for both of these experiences.

Now, I love woot.com, and have purchased more then a couple of items from them, including our beloved Roomba.  A few weeks back we ordered up beautiful wife a netbook from woot.com, complete with accessory kit. The netbook was red, and the accessory kit was supposed to match, it didn’t. Honestly, I didn’t even notice, opened up the new toy, and moved on. The next day I received this email, which not only blew me away because I hadn’t even complained, but it also cracked me up:

Being the color conscious Wooter you are, we apologize for the minor heart attack we caused when you opened the package containing the Red Acer Aspire One 10.1″ Netbook with Accessory Kit. “How DARE they!” you may have exclaimed as you saw that the red accessories were very much not red and would never go with your decor, “WHATEVER WILL I DO”.  But let it never be said that Woot does not care about matching accessories!

We still have these red accessories in stock and we will be sending these out to you, and everyone else who ordered the red netbook, automatically. No need to reply to this email, we’re simply giving you a heads up to expect another package with the correct accessories- we’ll send out the tracking to you when we have that available. We apologize for any inconvenience that our oversight may have caused you!

Sincerely,
Woot Member Services

Now that is how business should be done.

That evening beautiful wife and I had a date night planned over at the Melting Pot in Irvine, which is just about our favorite restaurant and they were debuting a new menu item that night. So of course we had to go. Earlier in the day I had been tweeting how much I was looking forward to dinner there, and low and behold the Melting Pot followed me on twitter, we joked back an forth about bad resume we had seen lately and then I headed home. When we got to our table this was there:

And you wonder why we like the place so much? By the way you can follow them too here. Do you have any good customer service stories? Let’s hear them!

Want to find out more about the back to work Dad, find me here:

You can follow me on twitter here, if you would like job hunting advice, email me at adam_thedad@hotmail.com