Yeah, but what would happen to this site if you guys just posted good customer service stories all the time?

"Help a customer, get good publicity. Repeat. See how easy that is?"

That's crazytalk, it could never possibly work. Oh wait.

Wow EA with good customer service, that is even more incredible then when I returned a broken headset to Circuit City and was given the full amount back in cash with no hassle in under 2 minutes.

As a customer service rep, I'd prefer if my customers wouldn't go public with all of the times I bend the rules.

You know, bosses and all of that.

@exkon: I like reading these! Plus, I'm sure there will always be enough bad customer service stories for blog fodder.

@mightydarv: Shhhhhhh, Netflix and Zappos would like to maintain their monopoly on this sort of behavior, since only they seem to know that customer service and profitability go hand-in-hand.

@mgy: But the rep isn't identified and this is great PR is well worth the $13 they would have received if he had paid for the replacement number.

@exkon: We'd be in heaven.

oooh. Spore is basically unplayable, there are so many bugs.

Considering EA is notorious for having questionable service, its always good when you see there are a couple good people working for a company willing to help a person out.

Its good to see the rep actually trusted the customer enough to just give him a new serial..

If only all the other companies with shady CS skills TRUSTED the consumer.. I wonder how much easier it would make everything!!

@AliyaBabasaur:

To play the devil's advocate here, there is certainly enough information to ID this rep if his boss was so inclined. Even more so since the conversation was most likely recorded. But even if it wasn't I know you could track down a customer service transaction with that information.

At the same time, I agree that this positive PR is nothing but good for EA, however I've meet plenty of managers that only give a crap about following guidelines and rules that would fire this guy in a heartbeat if he crossed the line.

I bet that customer support person gets reprimanded for this.

@exkon: This site would be promoting customer focused companies. Word of mouth advertising is the strongest.

@VidaBlueBalls: and NewEgg.

It is nice that they replaced the serial number for free. But it having a serial number on a game is unnecessary to begin with.

Too bad EA is one of the shadiest damn companies out there. Installing DRM without telling you about it? Porting awesome games to consoles while simultaneously gimping them (Rock Band for Wii)? Killing once-good franchises just to milk them until they're dead?

No thank you.

@weakdome: Amazon will occasionally hug it out with you too.

@Corporate_guy: Good point, a policy must have been violated.

No good deed goes unpunished...

@Josh_G: blah...that's too bad. Although aren't there a lot of instances when CSRs can "do the customer a favor" when they were in fact authorized to do said "favor" all along. I had a friend who worked as a CSR and her script regarding some frequent requests went something like, "well, I'm not supposed to do this, but for you I can make an exception"... i find it infuriating that flat out lying to the customer is in their script

Battlefield 2 is a pretty old game, so I'm sure EA would not lose any real money even he was lying about purchasing the game.

Low hanging fruit.

I contacted Konami about an issue back in November and haven't gotten a response. Three phone calls were also worthless.

I think the key to this 'rule bending' is the common sense exercised by the EA rep, the biggest element missing from blind corporate customer service.

It also seems to help that this CSR knows the product that he is providing service for, being as how he knew the connection between all of the Battlefield games, instead of being an unfortunately ignorant CSR who barely speaks English, and reads off of a script.

@mightydarv:

Oh and one one bad customer service will get them back to square one. Funny how that works.

@InsertBullets: I had a similar experience at Best Buy of all places, bought a monitor, 3 days later saw it on sale for $65 less in their flyer. I went in expecting a battle of epic proportions, prepared my entire argument and expected to end up with some rebate that would ship in 6-8 weeks.

But much to my surprise the woman at customer service simple asked for my reciept, hit it with the bar code scaner and said, "ok $65 has just bee refunded to your amex card, thank you".

I was stunned, the whole process took less than a minute. It took them longer to ring up the monitor in the first place.

@ma3145tt: Hell hath no fury like the wrath of a consumer scorned who then proceeds to send the encounter to a consumer blog with high redership and devoted readers who value customer service.

@megs29: You mean I can be treated as something other than a software pirate and a criminal for purchasing games?

@the Goat: I like how Sins of a Solar Empire did it. You can install the game just fine without a number, but you can't register an account for online play and you can't get a patch from their site.

@axiomatic: Excuse my ignorance of ManagerSpeak, but what exactly does that mean?

@Con Seannery:

You know, like apples or oranges close to the ground...

He'll be fired soon.

He cost the company money!

Huh. Very, very surprising considering my experience with EA Games support. My last attempt at contacting them about being unable to get online with a game due to a server issue that was 100% their issue and not mine (I found a post by EA staff on one of their forums after posting the question, admitting it was their problem), I got an answer a week later that was not the expected, "Oops, temporary hiccup on our end, try again?". Instead, it asked for extensive personal information (real name, phone number, address, etc.) and didn't say a thing about it being their problem or that it'd been resolved.

They did send me a "rate our support" email request a couple weeks later. You bet your ass I told them what I thought of their "support." Maybe they're starting to get the message.

I empathize with EA here.. Customer lost the thing of value / wants it replaced for free.

My problem is that when a company f's something up with an order, we all want free gift cards, apologies, and a ride on that billionaire's goofy rocket-plane as compensation. But when we f' something up, it's "ohhh, pwease mister Company, I messed my pants, can you pwease cwean it up??"

I should misplace my laptop and see what Dell thinks about that. Maybe I'd EECB ol' Mike Dell to complain about my idiocy.

I love these Consumerist Hero stories. Even from companies that don't have a great rep, so I can idealistically opt into the notion that they've turned a new leaf.

No. One special case at does not win me over to see EA as a "good" consumer friendly company. It sounds more like Mike got lucky and found a tech support he clicked with than anything else. This one free serial key for battlefield 2 does not offset all the horrible things EA has done. Need I remind people of the Red Alert 3 CD key fiasco? It has a 20 character CD key and due to a printing error there were only 19. EA's solution at the time was to guess the missing character.

@exkon:

All things considered, I don't think this blog is in any particular danger of that any time soon :)

The good posts are just there to reward companies that actually do something good in the face of all the ones have awful service.

@exkon:

Actually, consistant examples of good customer service will turn posts from "another example of how much company GeneriCo sucks" into "a strange departure from the usual good behavior of GeneriCo", usually with several people backing up how the service is usually much better.

So no, one post in either direction will not immediately have a massive impact. Consistant stories will.

I love these stories because it proves that people can be nice, and companies can do well by being good to their customers. I'm also happy because Best Buy (stop booing! what I wanted to buy is backordered on Amazon) price matched Target (which was also out of stock) and I paid $3 on a DVD set because I also used a gift card.

@exkon: We'd know which companies to by S$!& from?

By phone sounds like it works better than by E-mail. I mailed with a simple request, I got a form letter response back that didn't answer my request.

@exkon:
Holy shit, are you imply there may be a day in which no company is trying to fuck over it's customers or employees?

Really, I'm amazed.

Such hope! Maybe, someday. <3

@BiancaDamputer: Not to mention that they treat their employees like crap. I avoid EA when possible, they're just too evil.

I like my Warcraft in-game help. It's usuallya bit sexier, but less satisfying:

[img216.imageshack.us]

@Hooray4Zoidberg: That's only because it was 3 days later. I think they have a week or 10 day period where they will match an advertised price on the same item. If I recall, they should refund 110% of the difference.

Had you of been over a week or 10 days, then you would've been returning a monitor and buying it elsewhere.

I recently had the exact opposite experience dealing with Datel/www.codejunkies.com with their Powersave for Wii. my son bought it open boxed at Best Buy, (subsequently lost the receipt). When we installed the software and typed in the serial we were informed that the number was already registered with another user. An email to their customer support got the reply that they can't issue new serials because of software piracy. I replied that the real pirate was the A-hole who first bought the device, installed and registered the software then returned it to the store for a refund. Kids weren't too upset because they'd spent less than ten bucks but I thought it was really unhelpful.

I talked to the nicest guy ever at EA the day after Christmas. He took the time to answer my (really ignorant) questions, and was just an all-around pleasure to talk to. Kudos to EA.

The thing is, how many people would exploit service like this if it happened all the time. I love having good service, and I've been seeing more and more of it recently because there are some good people out there starting to work for these companies, but how many people would take advantage of something like this to save money...

It's a sad, pathetic world we live in. :(

Now if I could only get someone to fix my damn Rock Band 2 mic...

@thisotherguy: Low hanging fruit means that we don;t need to pat these guys on the back too hard as this was too simple to resolve.