How to avoid a "miffed" customer

As an opinionated person, I tend to attract people who also have strong opinions. My good friend Meg is a great example of this phenomenon. After eyeing each other competitively across the lecture halls in college, we realized we were stronger as partners than as rivals, and thus began a great friendship (not to mention an A-collecting academic powerhouse, if you must know). Recently, Meg had an experience with Lands' End that she wanted to share here. Below is Meg's account of her customer service adventure. Enjoy!

There's nothing like realizing the birthday party you were invited to weeks ago is just days away. Not to mention having the perfect gift in mind and knowing that the monogrammed item you want to give most likely will not arrive in time for the event.

Well, there are in fact worse things that can happen.

With a week to spare (six business days to be exact), I knew I wanted to get Monica a Lands' End tote monogrammed with her nickname, "Miss D," in her favorite color, yellow. After a quick online search, I found what I was looking for, but soon realized that I had to call customer service to select a colored monogram. Fine, I could handle that. Upon calling and placing my order, I was informed that Lands' End was having some shipping delays and could not guarantee any sort of delivery time frame due to flooding in the area. Understanding that natural mini-disasters can not necessarily be blamed on Lands' End, I took the $8 hit to upgrade my shipping, prayed to the flooding gods to relent and crossed my fingers. The customer service rep assured me that the flood conditions were continuing to improve and the item should arrive within the next 5 days. Sounded good to me!

As promised, said package arrived within the next few days – yippee! A success! In my excitement I ripped open the package to examine Monica’s gift and voila! The bag I ordered, in the right color and size! And...and...and...who the hell is "Miff D?" The monogram was totally wrong – I couldn’t believe it. What a bust. I should have known it was too good to be true. My spirits dropped as I reach for the phone to call customer service once again.

The Lands' End agent promptly picked up – no automated recording. She introduced herself and asked how she can help. I explained the situation and urgently noted that while today was Tuesday, the correct gift was needed for the coming Sunday. She looked up my order number and read off the mistaken monogram – “'Miff D’ is that correct?” I clarified the “sssss” sound, and was informed that, apparently, f's and s's are commonly confused over the phone. The agent put me on hold and the voice that returned to the line introduced herself as a customer relations manager. I was astounded that this had happened, considering that I didn't even ask to speak with a manager.

The manager was immediately apologetic about the blunder and asked me what could be done to fix the situation. I explained that the tote was intended to be a gift and promised that if it could be re-monogrammed and shipped to arrive by Saturday, I would forever be a grateful and loyal customer. She continued to apologize for not confirming the monogram before the order was placed, adjusted my order, and prepared a new bag to be monogrammed and shipped for a Friday arrival. Moreover, she suggested I wait for the new bag to arrive before sending "Miff D" back to the warehouse, free of charge, of course.

On Friday morning while at work my phone rang – my mom. I knew the bag had arrived. She opened the package to confirm that everything was perfect. “Okay, here it is. Black right? It looks great! Oh, uh oh. Hang on, you didn’t want “Mipp D” did you?” I panicked, made a huffy breath sound and felt my blood pressure shooting up. “Just kidding!” My mom finally said. Hilarious.

Phew! That was  a close one. Although I was on the edge of my seat the whole time waiting for this gift, it did in fact arrive on time and exactly as I had intended, thanks to Lands' Ends amazing customer service. A+++

High__ _____ wire___ _______ ______ performance

There is a T-Mobile ad running on TV right now that bugs me for a couple of reasons. The ad is about a transient, couchsurfing twentysomething who spends the 30-second spot gushing about the great coverage he gets from T-Mobile in whatever disparate corner of America he happens to find himself in.

First of all, as a T-Mobile customer, I'm going to dispute the claim of stellar coverage and call quality. I haven't found this to be the case. I'll often miss key parts of what the person on the other end of the phone is saying to me, resulting in confusion for me and aggravation for my caller ("What? You want me to pick up a man on a farm?! Huh? Ohhh.. pick up some apples from the man at the farmstand? Yeah, I guess that makes more sense.").

The thing that really makes me scratch my head, though, is at the end of the commercial where T-Mobile does a little bragging about winning the "highest-ranked wireless customer service performance 7 times in a row" from J.D. Power and Associates. I'm fine with T-Mobile touting this award - in fact, I think it's a well-deserved accolade. The few (pre-blog) times I've had to call the customer service line I've been almost shocked by the friendliness and helpfulness of the staff. So I don't have a problem with promoting the award, it just doesn't really fit in the context of this commercial. This customer service award has nothing to do with call quality, so it seems strange stuck on the end like it is. It's almost like T-Mobile is trying to trick the viewers by talking about call quality and then quickly flashing an award on the screen, leading to the assumption that the award applies to call quality. I smell a bait and switch!

I hope no one out there got tricked by this tomfoolery. If you did, unless you live out West or in the Southeast, you're going to need that excellent customer service to call and complain about all the important conversations you're going to miss.

"I'm getting married to that boy who's a friend of Lindsay's!"
"What?! You're getting married to my boyfriend?!?!"

Because I still think T-Mobile has great customer service that IS worth bragging about, I'm going to give this a lukewarm check.

Service that should be copied

I'm sure anyone who works in an office, like me, is plagued by the fear of technology failing at inopportune moments. In my office, our printer is notoriously finicky. This is a major problem for me since I provide all sorts of printed materials to co-workers and customers. So when the printer fails, I kind of panic.

Each time my sweaty palm picks up the phone to call Xerox for service, I get through to a real person in record time (never more than 30 seconds on hold), provide only minor details about the problem I'm experiencing, and am promised a callback from my local technician within an hour. This swift, simple process never fails to calm my nerves. I practically expect the person on the other end of the phone to sense my anxiety and coo in a motherly tone, "There, there. It's going to be okay. We'll make your printer good as new! Now, how about a cookie?"

The amazing thing about that promised callback is that it actually happens. The local technician quickly calls me back to get a few more details about the problem, and schedules a time within the next 24 hours when he can come check it out. He either arrives on schedule or calls me to let me know he'll be late, and he stays until the machine is fixed. If he's not able to fix the problem on the spot, he either returns quickly with a missing part, or tells me exactly what the holdup us, what he's going to do about it, and when he's going to do it.

The only time I was momentarily dissatisfied with Xerox's service is when I thought the technician was playing music on his laptop while he was working (in the middle of the office!!). Turns out, what I heard was hold music - the technician was actually on hold with another specialist, and had turned his speakerphone on so he could do something else while he was waiting. A service technician multitasking?! Sure provides a stark contrast to the laziness of other companies' technicians, as reported, and videotaped by some consumers.

Although I will always harbor a simmering grudge against the temperamental machine itself, I can't help but be impressed with the service Xerox delivers. Check plus for Xerox!

This call is being monitored

From time to time, when my company is mentioned in a TV segment, I try to obtain the clip from VMS, a company that can find the clip for you and provide it in a digital format. It's a pretty handy service but over three years of working with them, I've had spotty customer service and often slow delivery times on time-sensitive projects. But nothing quite like this has ever happened...

A recent episode of a popular television show featured one of our products, so I emailed my contact (for anonymity she doesn't deserve, I'll call her Celia) to request a clip and a high-resolution image of the product. I made sure to specify that I needed a high-resolution image or screenshot, because I wasn't sure if VMS had the capability to do this.

This original email, sent first thing in the morning, went unanswered; I only found out through a phone call I placed to the office later that day that Celia was working on it. When I asked about the feasability of getting a screenshot from the digital clip, Celia confirmed that it shouldn't be a problem because all VMS video clips are high quality. Satisfied, I asked her to please call me when the clip was ready.

First thing Tuesday morning, having not heard back from her, I sent an email checking on the status of this time-sensitive project, which elicited two responses at 10:30 a.m. and 3:20 p.m. Both emails made the misleading promise that the clip should arrive "shortly."

When I finally received the clip 24 hours later, on Wednesday afternoon, neither I nor a freelance graphic designer were able able to obtain a screenshot from the video. This was very frustrating, given that I had specified this need in my original email, and that Celia had assured me it would be possible. I called and left a message with the receptionist for Celia, requesting help getting the screenshot ASAP, but received no call or email back. On Thursday afternoon I again emailed Celia, and received the following response:

“I sent another email to rush the order.
You should have received it by now that's why I'm still in the office. [my emphasis]
You should be receiving it shortly.”

This email was sent at 5:15 p.m. 5:15! Please, don't let me keep you chained to your desk until all hours of the night. 5:15! It's inhuman to work that late! The bold-faced rudeness of this email truly shocked me.

Two more emails sent Friday and Monday received no response. I finally got the screenshot from some manager at VMS who told me quite snippily that Celia had sent it on Thursday, and that it must be in my junk mail folder. Obviously, it wasn't. Plus, if Celia had supposedly sent it, why didn't she respond to my frantic emails to alert me that it was ready? The worst part was that the image I finally did get 1) is terrible quality and 2) arrived too late to be used in a timely fashion, rendering it irrelevant.

Almost immediately, I emailed the manager back, detailing my exchanges (or lack therof) with Celia over the past week, and expressing my extreme disappointment with how this project was handled. That was almost 24 hours ago and I have yet to receive a response.

Now, to be fair: our products aren't on TV too often so we're not one of VMS's biggest accounts. However, I don’t feel that any customer deserves to be treated with so little respect. Not calling a concerned customer back after repeated messages is inexcusable.

I'll also concede that Celia's job is pretty terrible overall: high-stress, demanding customers, lots of mind-numbing video to slog through... But most service-oriented jobs have unpleasant elements like these, which can be handled one of two ways: with a bad attitude, leading to poor performance and increasing stress levels, or with a positive attitude, leading to happy (or at least informed) customers and less stressful situations. You can bet that I will think twice before I call Celia for anything in the future. Check minus for VMS.

InDesign and OutSourcing

Yesterday I spent almost an hour on the phone with Adobe Customer Support, trying to fix a problem I was having with InDesign. I'm not a graphic designer and my company does not currently have a designer (or anyone who knows design software) on staff, so my 2 semesters of graphic design in college make me the resident expert and problem fixer. I tried unsuccessfully to solve the problem with our internal IT person, and finally resorted to calling the 800 number.

After navigating through a few automated menus, my call was answered (promptly, I'll give them that) by a woman who must have been sitting in the middle of a congested call center somewhere in India. The background noise was really distracting right off the bat, and sometimes I couldn't tell if she was talking to me, someone nearby, or if I was just hearing the person next to her on another call. This in itself was maddening.

The first thing I was asked to provide was a name, telephone number and email address. Name - easy enough. Phone - had to repeat it twice, slowly. Email address - total nightmare. Granted, the domain name of my company is long and consists of two words whose spelling is very similar. However, I lost count of how many times I had to repeat the spelling of my email address. It took a solid three minutes of excriciating "a like apple, b like banana" spellings to finally get it right.

Once all this information had been recorded, and knowing that it was being used to find a record of past service calls and/or identify my registered Adobe product, I explained that I had never personally called Adobe before, and that the product (Creative Suite 2) was registered to my company under the name of someone who no longer worked for us. After a few moments of confusion on her end, she asked for the name, number and email address of the person to whom the product was registered. I gave it, but no records were found.

I again reminded the woman that we may have never called for support before, so we might not be in her database. I asked if there would be anything else she could use to identify me, and she then asked for the registration number of the product I was using. Since I had InDesign open on the machine in front of me, I looked up the 20-digit number and read it off to her. Three times, slowly, until she got it right. She said it seemed as though there were some numbers missing, so I read it again. Nope, she said, there should be 24 digits to the registration number, and this was only 20. I figured I must have looked in the wrong place and asked where I could find the number.

She then proceeded to walk me through a number of steps that not only didn't work, but didn't apply to my specific version of the software. She was asking me to open menus and options that did not exist in the version I was running. I'll spare you the details, but she finally informed me that the 24-digit number could be found on the box that came with the software. Knowing it was a longshot that this was still in the office somewhere, I dispatched our IT person (who was standing next to me this whole time) to find it.

Miraculously, he came back with a box - but it was for CS3 (which we run on different machines), not CS2! I explained this to the woman on the phone, reminding her that we had legally purchased copies of CS2 and CS3, and is there any way we can use the registration number for CS3, just to get me thorough to a tech support person? Remember, I'm STLL talking to someone who is simply trying to verify my account. I haven't even begun to solve my real problem yet. She said that that definitely won't work, but that we could try it. The four readings that it took to get this 24-digit number recorded correctly took more patience than I thought I had left, and brought me straight to the end of my rope.

The IT guy, sensing disaster, stepped in and grabbed the phone before I had the chance to hurl it across the office and give someone a concussion. He talked to her for a few more minutes while I calmed down, giving the details needed to create an account for our company. When he put me back on the phone, the woman told me that although we had given the necessary information to receive support for CS3, since we were calling about an issue related to CS2, the tech support department wouldn't really be able to help me, but I would be able to ask some "general questions" about Adobe products. At that point I didn't even care who I was transferred to or what they could or could not tell me, I just wanted to be done with her, so I grunted some kind of reply and was released.

As my call was routed across the Atlantic Ocean back to Adobe tech support in the US, I glanced at the clock. 45 minutes on the phone trying to verify a product that my company had legally purchased multiple times for different people in the organization. Absurd.

My exchange with tech support was mostly unremarkable except for the fact that the bored and sleepy-sounding guy I spoke with seemed to be holding the phone about 10 feet in front of his face, only bringing it closer when I said politely (four times) "I'm sorry, I'm having a really hard time hearing you." He didn't really solve my problem, but he gave me an idea of what the problem might be and how it could be fixed (the solution will require the assistance of a freelancer who knows InDesign a bit better than I do). I was on the phone with him for less than 15 minutes.

Now, I realize verifying that a product is legal is an important step for a company whose software is pirated every day by people around the world. According to Adobe's own web site, the economic loss associated with software piracy is estimated in the tens of billions of dollars. That may be something you want to try protect yourself against, but why put the burden on your customers who are calling in for help using your product? From what I remember from my hacker friends in college, it's easy enough to obtain a legit registration number for a piece of pirated software anyway. Plus, if I did own an illegal copy of the software and received friendly, quick and helpful support for that product, I'd think it would make me much more likely to actually purchase from the company in the future.

Regardless, I think taking down these ridiculous, time-consuming, and bang-your-head-against-a-wall frustrating barriers to service might also bring down some of the costs of running Adobe's customer service department. If phone operators could spend less (or no) time trying to clear someone like me to receive the help I need, maybe there wouldn't be the need to have as many operators. Of course, when you're hosting your call center in India, I guess your cost per person isn't really that big of a deal anymore... but I'm not going there... not today at least. Check minus for Adobe.

Live chained to the script... or die

Rich suffered through a nightmarish interaction with Bank of America's customer service department this morning. An erroneous check that his roommate had written to him (and then cancelled) was somehow subtracted from Rich's checking account twice, putting him in the red.

After fighting through the automated phone system to reach a live person (tip: next time, try http://www.gethuman.com/), Rich reached an operator who seemed completely unable to deviate from the script, ignoring everything he said. Somehow, she figured out that one of the charges didn't belong on the account, and removed it. Hooray! Mission accomplished! You'd think the story was over, but this was just the beginning of what BoA shockingly thinks is a great marketing opportunity.

Rich continues: "When she was done she immediately launched into a pitch for a pre-approved credit card. She talked for two minutes without a pause or a chance for me to interrupt. While she was talking, I thought to myself, 'I called to have BoA fix their mistake that overdrew my account, and they ended up trying to sell me something!' When I was finally able to reject the credit card offer, she wanted to know why. She then told me that I had been selected to participate in a survey and asked me to "please stay on the line" before quickly transferring me away without another word. I waited on the line for about 20 seconds, realized that there was no reason for me to do this, and hung up."

While there were a few mistakes made here by the BoA representative, the thing that disturbs me the most is that she seems to have no power to judge the circumstances of the call and adjust her actions accordingly. Many companies like BoA don't empower the people who answer their phones to truly interact with the caller to solve the problem. If BoA doesn't trust their own employees to make sound judgements that will delight their customers, why did they hire these individuals in the first place? I can just imagine the giant, threatening sign looming over each operator's cubicle, reminding her to "Stick to the script!" Check minus for BoA.