Archive for the 'Customer Service' Category

And here comes the next spectacular ruckus regarding indy-writers and the (relatively) non-elected, totally bureaucratic and ham-fisted powers of our universe. This one, for a marvel, does not involve Amazon.com, at whose door can be laid the last couple or three of these shindigs. This one involves Paypal, that pearl of great price … and fairly substantial fees on transactions although not too onerous as these things go, certainly better than pawn shops and payday check cashing establishments without a particle of the stigma and it usually makes up for the convenience of the transaction and who am I to object, actually?

Read the rest of this entry »

I live in the mountains east and north of Los Angeles. Last summer, when I bought my house, I ordered Direct TV for television service as the cable company wouldn’t even schedule an installation until the escrow closed. I had no complaints about the TV service until the first snowfall. I had no service for two days. I called Direct TV and was told that snow interferes with the signal (duh !) and there was nothing I could do. I had a satellite dish in New Hampshire in 1994 and 95 and never had this problem. The next time it happened I called and finally got to a technical advisor who told me there was such a thing as a dish heater but Direct TV had nothing to do with them. He did give the URL of several web sites where I could get more information. I found that I would have to install the heater myself and the dish is nearly 20 feet above my upper deck.

Last weekend, when we had more snow, Cindy was atop a seven foot ladder trying to reach the dish with a broom but with no luck. The angle of the dish, which catches more snow, makes it impossible to brush the dish off. It seems to be a pretty common problem and one would think that Direct TV would anticipate these problems in areas with substantial snowfall. Maybe they could supply the dish heaters as an option, especially when the dish is mounted so high. Then the technician could install both. The new dishes also seem to be of a deeper chord and the location may determine the angle of elevation to the satellite. New Hampshire is a higher latitude, as is Chicago, and that dish seemed to be flatter in my recollection.

Does anybody in Greater Chicago use these dishes and do they have problems like this ? I got nowhere with them, and am not about to try to install a heater on the dish, so I finally canceled and will have to pay a substantial early cancellation charge.

Next summer I am going to France to ride my bike in the Pyrenees on some famous mountains that are featured in the Tour de France from time to time. Also on the agenda is a race. It has been a long time since I have been out of the country; my passport was expired so it had to be renewed. I decided to do it by mail.

The government was pretty efficient! I sent my old one in on October 21 with the required forms (and $110!) and received my new passport yesterday, November 5. Exactly 15 days door to door. I think that is pretty damned good for a government agency. If you need to renew a passport, perhaps this is not a busy time of year for them. On a sad note, the dollar is getting killed right now and this vacation is getting more expensive by the day – I bought some euros a few months ago, but apparently not enough. But currency markets are funny, we will see how it goes.

On another note, I have jacked up my workout regimen (more) so I can be competitive in the race (165 km with a finish atop the Plateau de Beille) and I have been looking into post workout recovery supplements/drinks. I have read conflicting information that says I should take these drinks immediately after working out and also that I should wait until the next day. Any info you have on this subject would be appreciated as to what and when I should be doing after my workouts to supplement my muscle development.

Cross posted at LITGM.

Well, the talk is that my oldest will be getting braces soon. She needs them. Her mother and father both went through it so it was pretty much expected. She also has an overbite which will need to be corrected. Back to this in a minute or two.

Have you ever had a person in your life that seemed to drop out of the blue, but affected you in an interesting way? Henry Rollins did. In his essay Iron, he speaks of Mr. Pepperman, who took pity on a scrawny, dorky kid, and taught Rollins how to lift weights. This gave Rollins a sense of accomplishment. It is a great essay and very motivational. I carry a copy of Iron in my briefcase and read it when I need a swift kick in the pants. Whenever I am sore or tired and don’t feel like going to the gym or running or biking or whatever training I need, I read Iron, strap it on, and get to work.
Read the rest of this entry »

Four customer service stories:

1)Telephoning a restaurant. Call a restaurant on the phone–to make a reservation, check on the specials, whatever..and you will likely hear something like this:

Thank you for calling Snarfer’s Steakhouse, where the elite meet to eat. My name is Tiffany…how may I be of assistance to you today?

You can bet Tiffany didn’t come up with this string of words herself. She has been told exactly what to say, has to say it 100 times a day, and is so tired of saying it that she often slurs the words together:

Thank-you-for-calling-Snarfer’s-Steakhouse-where-etc-etc-etc

Often, the message is so slurred and incomprehensible that I’m not sure I’ve called the right number, resulting in a question:

Is this Snarfer’s Steakhouse?

This kind of thing originated with chain restaurants but can now often be found at many independent restaurants as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

I made a mistake several years ago, but I didn’t know it at the time.  It wasn’t a dreadful mistake, but one which I thought I would share with you to perhaps give some guidance and solicit some comments.

About 5 years or so I was sold on purchasing some shares (are they really shares?) of a fund of hedge funds.  I will admit right off the bat that I didn’t know what it does, what it did, or how it works.  I trusted my financial advisor as he told me that it was a great way to diversify my portfolio.

Last October/November I decided to look at every single one of my investments and decide if I needed to sell the position and rebuy (to take the tax loss) or to hold, or to simply sell.  I decided that this fund of funds needed some investigation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Under the heading of “we’re all in this together” and “there are heroes among us”:

Tonight I phoned MasterCard; they hear from me quite a lot since I’m pretty incompetent. (I lost my purse for about a week; Target wouldn’t tell me they had it even though I kept phoning; when I dropped by they said, sure, and immediately gave it to me.). So tonight I’m pointing out that I can’t figure out a couple of bills I probably got suckered into by filling out something on the net.

The woman was quite helpful and consistently apologetic though I’m pretty sure it was my fault and told her so. As we were about to hang up, I asked her where she was. She said Mumbai. I gasped and offered my condolences. She told me about a friend trapped in an office during the seige. She said they had learned from the incident – learned to be more vigilant, to be more careful. And that people had reached out to others in warm ways. Still, the destruction of the beautiful landmark was disturbing. And, she hoped all of us (I doubt she mean America hadn’t) would take a consistent stand against the terrorists. We spoke of the stories of heroism. She said I made her feel better – certainly, she made me feel better. The virtue of a world economy is that it brings together people like us, over the telephone very early in her morning and in my evening. We share much; of course, we can share much because we speak English. Her Indian accent and my Mid-western one give no trouble. And it is yet another argument that no matter how tragic the loss of languages may be (and I agree, the more we “save” the better), the sooner and more broadly we have a strong, common language the more moments like this will happen.

Compare and contrast:

Renew two software licenses

-Login at software company website. Both licenses are listed. A “renew license” link appears next to each license. There is no way to select both licenses for simultaneous renewal.

-Type name, address, etc. on online order form.

-Click link to “preferred” credit-card processor.

-Type name, address, credit card info on online form.

-Click “pay” link. Get rejected by credit card company.

-Repeat entire process starting at software company home page. Get rejected again by credit card company.

Read the rest of this entry »

Grannies: Gotta Love ‘Em:

(A new employee informs me that she spotted a little boy sneaking some candy in his pants. I confront the boy and an older woman about it.)

Me: “Excuse me, ma’am. Hey, kiddo, what’s in your pocket?”

Boy: “Nothing!”

Granny: “Oh, h***, again?! Boy, if you don’t put that d***ed candy back, that lady gonna call the po-po on you! And I ain’t gonna stop her none.”

(The boy, crying, hands me 2 candy bars and a handful of suckers. I thank the lady, and get back to work. A few minutes later, the boy’s mother comes up to me.)

Read the rest, it’s worth it :)

It seems Carl las opened up quite the can of worms talking about the shoddy service he receives on a regular basis in Chicago.  First off, Carl needs to move to Racine or Valparaiso and start commuting every day so he can begin to enjoy the fruits of living rural.  Jokes aside, I do have some relevant thoughts.

I agree with Ginny in her post on the subject on the red/blue states.

I tend to agree with the comments about red state/blue state divisions, though clearly it is often a matter of rural/urban and mompop/corporate.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Service:  I tend to agree with the comments about red state/blue state divisions, though clearly it is often a matter of rural/urban and mompop/corporate.  Engagement takes energy and minimal intelligence, but most of all it takes an attitude.  Tailoring service to customers is generally best done by widely distributed responsibility and encouragement of innovation.  Shannon’s observations are good. Establishing a relationship requires some time – a large turnover of either customers or workers means that the relationship can’t grow.  Knowing customers, we soon expect that customer to add the extra change that keeps his pockets cleared – though such an exchange was surprising the first time it happened.  After a while, a customer knows what the business can do and a business knows what the customer is likely to like.  In the old days, clerks at stores would put aside certain dresses they knew their customers would like; clerks would step into the dressing room and discuss exactly how a bra should fit.  But the temporary nature of workers, the shifting clientele - all these make such interactions impossible. 

Read the rest of this entry »

Carl From Chicago’s post on poor service reminded of my own service career during my extended college tenure. I learned that some problems in service have to do with customers. 

For example, Carl innocently observes: 

There are two dimensions for my coffee – “black” and “large”. I have learned through hard experience to wait until the clerk is ready to receive this complex and easily forgotten information; you’ll just have to repeat it five more times. 

The problem that a counter-jockey has with this order lies not its complexity but rather its ubiquity.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I needed to go to the post office in downtown Chicago for a certified letter. Yes, it would seem, the post almost writes itself… the lines were long and, in the middle of it, one of the two employees wandered off to take a break or something. The guy next to me, an older guy, was about to lose his mind with rage. He said “this must be how it is under communism” and seethed with rage. My response was that the selection of employees was essentially designed to “employ the unemployable” in the name of limiting social unrest as a thinly disguised government work program. At one point, an actual competent employee came in and took all the people in line to self-service machines and helped me personally, for which I was thankful. The entire process, which should have been simple, took over an hour.

I was in a local sandwich shop called “Corner Bakery” (which I usually call “Corner Confusion”) where you order in one place and they give you a tag to put on your table, and then you wait for your sandwich to come to you. This sort of process always scares me, because the shop is big and there is a patio outside, so they don’t know where you are sitting and it just seems like they could miss you. Well, this time they found me… a waiter who didn’t speak English very well came over and set my sandwich in front of an older guy and gave him my sandwich (one was flat bread so it should have been obvious which was which). The other guy was about to go apoplectic with rage but I had been watching the whole thing, just assuming that it would be screwed up, and I calmly got up and switched sandwiches with the guy (I was watching him, too, to make sure he didn’t take a bite out of it). He was in mid rant but I didn’t care, I just wanted lunch.

Often I go by McDonalds for coffee (I don’t like Starbucks very much, although I usually go there just because it is preferred by others and I don’t care very much overall) and it is part of the rest of my order. There are two dimensions for my coffee – “black” and “large”. I have learned through hard experience to wait until the clerk is ready to receive this complex and easily forgotten information; you’ll just have to repeat it five more times. It is beyond expectations that you could ask for your order (like a number “9″ or something and AT THE SAME TIME say “large coffee, black”) without having to repeat it later. But you need to stay on it, or you never know what you’ll get.

Through myriad travels and eating out continually for years I have three expectations for the US service sector, so that I am never disappointed:

1) they know nothing
2) they do nothing
3) they annoy me

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Reddit.com:

The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT – Somebody’s got to do them — and hopefully that somebody isn’t you.

I especially like this:

Dirty IT job No. 5: On-site reboot specialist

Seeking individuals for on-site support of end-users. Must be familiar with three-fingered Ctrl-Alt-Del salute and power cord reconfiguration. Ability to withstand a variety of environments and personality types; concealed-weapons permit a plus. Individuals with anger management issues need not apply.

Closely related to the help desk zombie, but even lower on the totem pole, is the on-site reboot specialist, says Scott Crawford, research director at Enterprise Management Associates in Boulder, Colo. Unlike help desk or support vampires, the on-site rebootnik must venture out into the physical world and deal with actual people.

[ For more fear and loathing of end-user interaction, check out the original "Stupid user tricks: Eleven IT horror stories"]

If you think that this passage suggests a certain level of misanthrophy you haven’t had to put up with enough of the anthropoi out there yet.

Adobe is running a promotion during February. If you own any version of Photoshop Elements (the cheap version of Photoshop) you can upgrade to the latest full version of Photoshop, CS3, for $300 + tax. This represents about a 50% discount from the regular price, and is only $100 more than the price to upgrade from a previous full version of Photoshop. (To take advantage of this deal, call 800-585-0774, mention offer 27105 and be ready to provide your Photoshop Elements serial number.)

Read the rest of this entry »

We live in the boonies – no straight flights here. Lost luggage is not uncommon. One day two pieces arrived at our door from two different airlines – our son-in-law and my husband had lost pieces on separate flights from separate countries that week. Another time, my husband wasn’t allowed on a better connecting flight because he wouldn’t be traveling “with” his luggage which had not yet arrived – understandable in terms of home land security, perhaps, but the piece did not arrive with him but days later.

This Christmas my son-in-law’s parents, eager to see their grandchild, missed a series of connections and ended up quite late. Not surprising. And then, inevitably, all four pieces of luggage were missing. After hurried runs to stores for toiletries & wearing their son’s shirts for a day or two, three appeared at the local airport. My son-in-law spent the next ten days phoning & e-mailing British Air Ways (whose system apparently consists of looking around when hassled and promptly forgetting the problem after hanging up.)

As luck would have it, this piece had gifts for their grandson, knitted caps & scarves for their daughter-in-law, heirlooms to be presented and gifts from German friends – all gone. Most irreplaceable was the baptismal gown that matched Heidi’s skills as a seamstress with her love as a grandmother. If it appears – increasingly unlikely – it will be too late for the ceremony this weekend in St. Louis.

Read the rest of this entry »

Click any photo for larger version.

A few months back I took a trip to Minneapolis. Included on my trip was a stop at the Walker Art Center (highly recommended). From there I took this photo. I liked it so much I wanted to get a wall hanging of it and ordered a canvas wraparound from Shutterfly.

The hanging was not cheap, but I really wanted one so I ordered it up, at a total cost of $180. It arrived within one week and the results were spectacular. I was very happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tired of filing paper statements for checking accounts, I logged onto my bank’s website to see how to sign up for electronic-only statements (a service the bank has been pushing heavily). Here is what they say:

Your electronic statements are exactly the same as your paper statements. Each month you will receive an email informing you when your statement is available online. Your statements will remain online for 24 months on our secure web site and may be downloaded or printed for permanent retention.

But this is a lie. Electronic statements are not exactly the same as paper ones. Paper statements don’t disappear after two years in my filing cabinet. (There have been instances when I needed transaction information that was more than 2 years old.) So if I go electronic I will have to do even more work, printing statements myself, if I want to continue keeping records as I do now. I can see why the bank likes this arrangement but what’s in it for me?

Banks are so stupid. If they promised to keep my statements on their computers indefinitely I would sign up to go paperless in a second. They would still come out ahead. Can anyone imagine that it costs them less to print and mail twelve statements a year — plus credit-card and loan solicitations, privacy policies, etc. — than to store my data for the same period on their hard drives? What a bunch of dopes. Of course these are the same people who always jump, lemming like, into whatever lending sector is currently overdone and therefore fraught with hidden risk. And then they get burned and become irrationally risk-averse until the next business fad comes along.

UPDATE: Another bank makes the electronic statements available in perpetuity, but requires me to request them a day before it will show them to me online. That’s better, but why can’t they simply make all statements readily available all of the time?

Most people who have flown are familiar with the Southwest Airlines “cattle call”. For those who don’t know what it is, I will give a quick explanation.

Southwest doesn’t give assigned seats for their flights, rather they issue a letter to you, A B or C. When you get to the gate, they simply say “group A get on” and that is what happens. Those who check in earlier receive the preferential section and therefore the best shot at getting those invaluable exit row seats. The problem with this was that people would begin lining up hours in advance of the flight. They had separate lines for the A, B and C sections. If you were in the rear of the section A people, there is no shot at the more valuable seats, but at least you could still get an aisle or window.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve complained enough about bad service in the past that it’s only fair that I report an instance of good customer service.

Read the rest of this entry »