I intend writing regularly about good or bad customer service as experienced by me and this will be the first one in that series.
This is to place on record my appreciation for a online merchant who rectified a mistake at their end with a prompt replacement.
I had ordered for a book to be delivered to a friend in Chennai with Hindu e Shop. Instead of sending the book to my friend in Chennai, since I am a frequent buyer, the book was sent to me and I received it yesterday.
I rang them up immediately on receipt and they apologised and promptly arranged for a replacement to be despatched to Chennai yesterday itself and requested me to keep the book received by me as a gift from them to me.
I am impressed.
So rare these days. I had tried to order a calendar from an Irish artisan and messaged him to tell him his website put me into one of those endless circular clicking nightmares and the order form never showed up. His response? He ships all over the world and never had that problem before, thus pissing me off. My response would have been an apology and an offer to ship directly, bypassing his idiotic website and wasting my time.
/rant over
XO
WWW
I have had similar experiences with automated customer service systems notorious for their ability to frustrate customers. I hope to come across some in the future about which too I shall write in my new series.
I look forward to your posts on what is a very contentious subject! Like most people I’ve had customer service that’s varied from superb to appalling. And yes, it seems to be getting gradually worse. Too many companies seem to provide indifferent service as the norm, and they only provide better service when the customer complains loudly.
The main problem with big marketers now is their automated systems for customer service. Please see WWW’s comment here and my response.
What a wonderful story, and fairly rare these days it seems? Thanks for sharing!
My friend from Chennai rang me up to confirm receipt of the replacement copy yesterday and all is well that ends well.
what I loathe is the little jiggly icon at the bottom of some pages with “ask Olive” and when you try to ask, “olive” get’s confused. Olive likes you to be short in style and words. Olive doesn’t understand or gives some stupid reply!
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I haven’t come across such icons over here. Must be something local for your market.
https://www.countdown.co.nz/ – bottom right hand corner – click on it – you will see “Olive” has lots of FAQ answers 🙂 But also there are often “chat windows” for various other online places.
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I see now. Pop up online chat boxes. Some of our sites too have these but, generally approached through their customer service option.