Metzger Business

January 5, 2011

Service as a Standard

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 10:00 pm

Is service a standard for your business? How far will you go to ensure your customers are satisfied? When service is a standard you don’t have to get hung up on issues of how to satisfy a customer you just do. We experienced an excellent example of service as a standard over the holidays.

We drive Toyota’s and over the holiday’s Toyota did a lot to ensure we continue to drive Toyota’s for a long time. We were driving from Atlanta down to Orlando so we could visit Disney for a few days. It was an exciting trip to be making with the family. We stopped in Valdosta Ga to get gas. I was inside with the kids and somehow my wife managed to insert 3 gallons of diesel into our gas tank at which point it occurred to her that something was wrong. So along with a few headaches we brought the car to the local Toyota dealer at 5:00PM on December 23rd. This was just going to be a nightmare, or so we thought.

The dealership luckily was open and the service manager hadn’t left quite yet but they had already sent home all the mechanics. The did have  an apprentice on duty but the service manager wasn’t comfortable having this guy work on the car. He wanted to make sure the job was done right. He asked if we could stay overnight. We reservations for that night in Disney and breakfast with the characters the next morning.  Obviously staying in Valdosta would have killed that. They started calling rental companies but everything was closed. We were obviously upset and that is when Toyota made me a customer for life.

The Service Manager said look, no one will come in here tomorrow looking for our loner car. You guys can take it and just bring it back on Monday to pick-up your car on the way home. WOW! He got us to Disney and saved our vacation. But this story isn’t over.

On Monday when we drove back and picked up the car they didn’t charge us for the loner car.

NOW THAT IS CUSTOMER SERVICE!

Do you go the extra mile to ensure you have lifetime customers? What do you do to ensure customer come back?

July 28, 2009

Blog Talk Radio – Customer service situation #3

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , , , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 7:04 am

I do a weekly radio program on Blog Talk Radio. Blog Talk Radio is a service that provides a call in number and then does streaming audio over the Internet. They post to iTunes, tweet and update facebook for me. Overall I love the service and it’s free.

They also offer two levels of enhanced service. I signed up for the lower level enhanced service so I would be able to call my guests directly from the control panel. Unfortunately the service just didn’t work well. I emailed with and live chatted with customer service but they were just awful. There was no phone number to call and the service rep didn’t know what to do so she told to try contacting someone else but didn’t give me any information about who to contact. Then the function suddenly started working but the next time I logged in it did not work again.

So I hadn’t canceled the service yet as I really wanted the ability to conference people into the show but then I was billed and realized that since we hadn’t been able to get the functionality working it was time to cancel the premium service. Canceling the service was confusing. First I had to find where I could cancel the service. Then I hit the cancel button but did not receive any confirmation that the service was canceled, so I had to look around the site and I found something telling me that I had to notify BTL in writing that I was canceling. So I sent an email and asked for a refund. BTL responded to the email confirming that they canceled my service but had to refer me to another group for a refund. As of today 5 days after canceling I have not heard anything back from BTL.

Hmmm. They certainly are no Apple or even and Amazon. Good luck to BTL they’ll need it if they keep this type of customer service. I’ll continue to use the free service for now until I can find a better service else where.

July 15, 2009

Apple and Amazon Service

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , , , , — MetzgerBusiness @ 6:45 am

I recently signed up for both Mobile Me and Amazon’s Prime service. As it turns out I’m not continuing with either one of them. Mobile Me doesn’t work with Outlook when outlook is part of an exchange server, which makes it useless for my purposes. The Prime service I just don’t get enough benefit from to continue using it.

So Apple sends me an email yesterday saying I have seven days left on my free trial. In the email they tell me how much I’ll be billed, how to change my billing information and how to cancel if I wish. They obviously know they have a good service and assume most people will have a reason for leaving because the service does provide great value if you need it. It turns out I don’t need the service. I was able to cancel my account with no hassle what so ever and I even explained why I was canceling it when they asked because the process was made so easy.

Prime – I logged in to pay bills tonight and I see that my bank account is lower than it should be. Hmmm, I think to myself, Why is this? I look into the account details and what do I see, nothing but Prime staring back at me. No email warning, No this is how you cancel, No here is easy access to your account to cancel, No this is how much we’ll be charging your card in a few days nothing but a big fat hit to my account after the free trial ended. In my head Amazon is thinking “I know we can get at least on month hit out of this guy by charging him without warning. Maybe he’ll just cancel and not ask for his money back! HAHAHAHA” Okay well maybe that takes it a little far but you get the idea. I mean really how hard is it to tell your customers your going to bill them before you do? It creates such a better atmosphere of trust for the company and I can cancel if I really want to because maybe the service really wasn’t for me.

I’ve always loved Amazon and I think they are a great company. They are even one of the few affiliate programs I have advertised for in the past and still do on one of my other web sites, but I felt this Prime service they are offering is too expensive and maybe a little underhanded in how it’s marketed and then charged. The service is only valuable if you are ordering multiple times per month and unfortunately I just can’t afford to order that often.

I did call Amazon and received the service I expected. They removed the charge and took my suggestion to let people know before hand. I just hope they decide to act on it.

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