The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 17, 2010

Official News page 3


NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL CUSTOMER SERVICE

by Hazed

Like most people, I am all too ready to grumble when things go wrong, and pass on the word about a company giving less than sterling service. So it only seems fair that when a company does something right, I should tell you about that too.

The company is Amazon.co.uk and I am very impressed with the way they have responded to a problem with an order.

I ordered a DVD boxset* of a TV series from them, which arrived on Monday. Six disks containing 23 episodes. Only when I opened the box, instead of disks 5 and 6, there were duplicates of disks 3 and 4.

I sent an email to Amazon's customer service and within a few hours I had a reply. They apologized and said they had generated a new order to send me a replacement boxset. It despatched the same day and arrived on Tuesday. So less than 24 hours after I complained, I had the replacement.

They didn't expect me to return the original order until the new one had arrived and I had checked it to make sure it was satisfactory.

Then they refunded me the postage for returning the dodgy DVDs.

Now, that's how to do customer service. Other companies would have told me to return the defective boxset and only when it had arrived at their HQ would they have sent me a replacement. But Amazon, for all its faults, realizes that the way to keep a customer is to respond instantly to problems.

Kudos to Amazon.


* The series is called The Mentalist. It's an American cop drama but the twist (there has to be a twist!) is that the hero used to be a celebrity psychic (in other words, a con artist) but now freely admits he was a fake and uses his powers of observation and analysis to help the police. It's a cracking good drama, and it's great to see the sceptical perspective on TV.

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