hardballs

Paul bought a Kindle 2 from Amazon. He dropped it one day, and it sort of broke but not entirely, and Amazon wanted $200 to replace it. Instead, he got them to send him a $400 check, while still keeping the device. How?  More »

Here's a new trick for getting satisfaction from a reluctant company, using Twitter. We can call this one "tweet to power."  More »

After he got some overdraft fees that he felt were unfair, Karney Hatch decided to put the banking system on trial, and make a documentary about it.   More »

For weeks now I have been receiving fax calls on my house line, a number I've had for over twenty years and now ported to VOIP; somehow, at some point, it got included on a telemarketing fax CD.  More »

"Praise with faint damn" is the underlying secret to how professional complaint letter writer Bruce Silverman is able to be so successful in getting companies to give him free stuff. First class upgrades, Room upgrades with views of frolicking whales, Checks for hundreds of dollars... all these and more are the fruits of Bruce's calculated typewriter clacking. Now Bruce has come out with a small book with a big promise: to teach you How To Complaint For Fun And Profit. Here's a chapter from it, exclusively on The Consumerist, detailing how he was able to turn a disappointing experience at the Ritz-Carlton in Hawaii into a long-term stream of room upgrades, comped meals, and decidedly above and beyond customer service...  More »

"There's only one leverage any consumer has with a company. And that's financial." So says Ron Burley, author of UNSCREWED: The Consumer's Guide To Getting What You Paid For. I got to interview Ron Burley to plumb his brain about his customer satisfaction hacks, and the current state of affairs of customer service. His techniques are bold and make no apologies. We're not talking letters, and forms, and complaint departments. These are real methods for real people that work real fast. He also goes into the mindset that you need to develop if you're going to get results. Bookmark this post, it's an epic barnburner. Transcript, inside...  More »

A reader tells us how he got a debt collector who kept calling looking for someone else to stop calling, by turning the privacy invasion tables on him and freaking him out.  More »

Taking a big company to small claims court sounds like a big hassle but reader Bill has done it successfully three times. He says the time and effort spent on taking a company to small claims court is far less then how it long it takes to get companies to fix above-average in complexity problems.  More »

This classic article on the art of "turboing," escalating your problem to the executive's office, has some great advice about what to say when you get there. Here's a line Rob Levandowski, himself a former Tier 2 XEROX customer service rep, uses to get his foot in the door once he reaches the CEO's secretary:  More »

Shawn has a nice success story with the Seagate company that provides an interesting twist on the EECB (Executive Email Carpet Bomb) technique that we've been telling you about for months:

I bought a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750GB external harddrive about two or three months ago, and backed up several harddrives to it. Everything was going awesome on every computer I had, but then it had an issue on my desktop. "Delayed Write Failure" WHAT? I try to read the information on the drive, it won't allow me.

Reader Lona says that people in her family have called her a consumer advocate since she was sixteen, and now she is going to share with us 2,177 words on the customer service tactics and techniques she uses to get satisfaction. She writes, "in 99% of situations, it allows you to reach an agreeable solution to almost any problem. It is something I do for family and friends, and for myself." Some of her methods have been mentioned in various ways on the site before but others are completely unique. And by the time you read her true success story at the end, you'll swear she has Jedi mind-control over customer service reps. It boils down to, without raising your voice, asserting control over the conversation from the beginning and then never relinquishing that power.  More »

"Normally travelers will take whatever someone says. Challenge it. I'll say, 'I know how airports work and I know where the bag is.'" Mr. Tucci advises being kind and polite but assertive. "When it's an emergency, I don't obey the rules. I'll go to the front of the queue. Do what you need to do."  More »

Alan writes:

Three co-workers and I went out to lunch. We brought a coupon that said, "Buy one entree, and receive 50% off a second entree of equal or lower price." Three of us ordered food from the Entree section of the menu, but one of us ordered something from the [cheap] Sandwich section.  More »

Some of the tactics we recommend to consumers battling large and/or indifferent business are faster rather than nicer, and with good reason.  More »