In this day and age, it is a rarity that any company actually delights their customers. A lot of companies like to talk about customer satisfaction, but very few actually deliver on these promises. Perhaps companies like Twitter or Get Satisfaction are changing this paradigm by creating a face to the faceless brands and a channel to vent your frustration where the world can shame a company into taking action. But even those channels are still in their infancy.
In the past two weeks I have been pleasantly surprised by a few companies and their efficiency or attitude in dealing with me. So I wanted to give some shout-outs.
Yes, this one shocked me the most.
Every day on my way to work I drive past a fire hose that has been leaking. This irks me to no end. The waste of water must be enormous as it has been leaking for months now. I finally decided to take action. But whom to call? My first thought was the Camden Fire Brigade. I rang up and got a response befitting to any government agency. Something similar to a “computer says no” and pointed in the direction of Thames Water to pawn off the responsibility. I just about gave up at that juncture because I was pretty sure that I would get no further with Thames Water. But I decided to push on with one more call…
Got through immediately to Thames Water leakage department and explained the situation to the agent on the phone. He informed me that no one had previously reported this incident and that it would be looked at immediately. He took my name and number and gave me a reference code. Within 30 minutes, I had another call from a very nice lady at Thames informing me that they would be taking care of the issue, but needed time to arrange with the council because the leak is on a major road. Then she thanked me very graciously for reporting it.
All handled expertly and very politely. Yay Thames Water!
I am a huge fan of ASOS and buy tons of clothes on the site. I am also a huge fan of ASOS because yesterday I received an order and decided that I needed a larger size so put the clothes in the post in the afternoon for an exchange. This morning I had already received an email from ASOS telling me that they had received the return and processed the exchange. Literally within 18 hours. Awesome!
This company also made me smile with their prompt service. I ordered a t-shirt on Monday by regular post. I received the t-shirt on Tuesday. I returned the t-shirt on Wednesday. Today my return was processed and shipped. Whoop whoop!
Yes, I know I keep going on and on about how much I love my Lucky Voice home karaoke box. But I also really dig the fact that those lovely people at Lucky Voice were kind enough to reward me with a free month subscription for the service just for writing a review. They have definitely won me over as a loyal customer.
The moral of this story is that it is a nice to thing to live up to your promises, be efficient and also delight your customers.
