We regularly receive emails praising Apple’s customer support for the iTunes Store. Apple’s standard, often proactive, response is to offer a flexible credit. Below is one story from reader Evan:
Aaron’s feet were irritated by the stitching on a pair of Rafters sandals that he purchased last year from Dick’s Sporting Goods. Aaron tried to break in the sandals over the course of a year, but they still felt “like needles” in his feet. Aaron sent an email to The Combs Company, maker of the sandals:
I am just writing you folks because I am rather disappointed with the Rafters Sandals I purchased from Dick’s Sporting Goods approximately one year ago. When I tried them on at the store, they seemed like very comfortable shoes for the summer months. However, my first extended period of wearing them, I have realized that the stitching for the leather panels (the ones located directly below where the feet rest) are very irritating, to the point where if you walk for even a short period, the stitching feels like needles in my feet.
Verizon actually helped someone. His name is Matt, and he lives in Texas. Of course, he might be a fiendish undercover Verizon mole hiding behind a normal-sounding name. “Matt” claims to have purchased a Treo 700p on eBay, which was quickly felled by a faulty memory chip. Matt brought the paperweight to one of the notoriously unhelpful Verizon stores, where he got… help?
He said they didn’t have any 700p’s in stock, but he could offer me a 700w, the Windows version. I said no thanks, I want the same phone. He apologized profusely, told me they could ship me one, and that I’d have to talk to someone on the phone. He dialed a number, handed me the phone, and a customer service guy took all my information. He told me they’d ship me a new phone and a prepaid address label — all I had to do was send the broken phone back. “How long will it take?” I asked, expecting to hear “7-10 business days.”
If you can bear to read the meme-saturated twaddle of what Popken likes to call a “marketing douchebag”, Peter Blackshaw asks a crazy question: if companies are so interested in reaching out to their customers by having them make their ads and feel more involved in the business, why aren’t they paying any attention at all to the shameful service of their call centers?
Stuck in the phonic bowels of a robot automated customer support line, claustrophobically twitching for the five seconds of actual human interaction required to resolve your complaint, it can be hard to remember that sometimes automated lines actually have their advantages. Blair wrote us in with a positive experience with automation:
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