Customer Service

I recently picked up a book I read years back (just a year back really, shows my penchant for exaggeration eh?) titled "amazon.com - Get Big Fast." And the most fascinating part about the company is its focus on customer service. This time round, I haven't quite come across my favourite example but I was so impressed I can literally share the story with you guys off-hand.

The story starts with a customer ordering a softcover version of a title and expecting it to be in the mail a few days down the road in his mailbox. To his surprise(well they never quite mentioned what the customer's reaction was) he found a hardcover version of the same title with a note, handwritten, informing the customer that amazon.com ran out of the softcovers for that title and is sending him a hardcover one at no extra charge!

Another story tells of a customer who sent a postal order to pay for his purchases...well honestly I can't tell the story as well...so here's the Robert Spector's version. "Soon after launching the site, the company received an order from a customer who lived overseas. The customer sent Amazon.com a money order that was for the wrong amount. "Then he cancelled part of the order, so that we now owed him(the customer) money," recalled Barton-Davis. "But he decided to order some more books. He wanted to merge that order into the one he had already put in, and he wanted to pay for it with the remainder of the money order and a new money order.""

Wanna guess the response? "Jeff's(Amazon.com's founder) response to this was that the customer gets it his way."

Can you imagine that, despite the massive accounting and financial headache such an event would cause, Amazon's vision is that the customer gets what he wants as long as it is physically possible with the system.

I'll be honest, I really like that attitude! There were many times in my part-customer-service-part-administrative-duties job when I wished I could do more for the customer. One of the point that baffles me is why shouldn't I (or anyone else in my position" shouldn't be equipped and trained to handle a wider-range of customer enquiries since we(I represent my company) are calling the customer in the first place. It is disappointing (read: sucks) that I had to trouble customers to call our hotline for simple issues which would have been logically under my duties.

But I do try to be more jovial and attempt to match the styles of the customers I speak to. If the customer is in a rush, I speak faster, or ask if there's a more convenient time to give him/her a call. And I would schedule calls way back to check if a problem is solved, which gives me more work, having to track all this "extra" tasks. But it really is important and great to have problems solved for the customer.

mmm...maybe I should send appeal to my superior regarding this issue. The very least I should do now is to give suggestions as to what we can improve on to make ours a truly exceptional customer experience!