Customer service Lessons Learned

I know, I know, not another blog rant about some crappy service received from a giant corporation. Well, I can’t help myself. After dealing with a nightmare of a issue with a computer manufacturer (Dell), I took the time to reflect on my own customer service experience and thought I would jot down my experience.

One of the first issues that sticks out in my mind is one that was a bit tricky, based on the product in question.  When skateboard.com first started, we had our returns policy in place and made it very easy to access throughout the web site. One of the products that we sold a lot of at skateboard.com was skateboard decks. The skateboard deck, for those of  you who don’t know, is the actual wood board that you put your feet on and is obviously the most important part of a complete skateboard. The skateboard deck is made from wood and will break pretty easily, if you land on the board incorrectly. The skateboard manufacturer has a lifetime guarantee from manufacturers defects on the deck. There are only a few things that could possibly be defective on a skateboard deck that manufactures would be responsible for. In reality, 9 out of the 10 decks that are returned for breakage are usually a result of landing incorrectly on the board when doing a trick. But, it’s usually pretty hard to explain to a parent that the deck that they just paid $50 for, for little Johnny, and that he broke the same day he got it, was not defective. One of the first of my dealings with this incidence was not to long after we launched and we got a broken deck returned to us with a note saying they wanted a replacement. So, after reviewing the broken deck, we conclude that it was not defective.  We called the customer and spoke with them to explain that we couldn’t replace the board because it wasn’t defective. The kid understood but the mom wasn’t having any of it, she was down right nasty to us, threatened to charge back her credit card and buy another deck elsewhere. The fact that she was nasty to me made my decision to stick by our policy that much easier. She eventually harassed our CSR team enough that she got through to our current CEO.  The CEO made the decision to send her another deck. I explained that decks break and that this was going to be a problem moving forward if we didn’t enforce our return policy. After the decision was made to replace that one broken deck, we received a letter a few weeks later from that same customer that was so rude to me. The letter stated that she was very grateful that we made a decision to replace the deck and that being a single mom, not making much money, it wasn’t easy to spend $50 for a skateboard,  bah blah. You know the regular old sob story. Never-the-less, she was happy, the kid was happy and we were cruising along. Fast forward a few months later, at Christmas time, one of our CSR’s had gotten a phone call from the same lady, she gave the CSR her CC info and gave instructions that her son had a $500 limit and could get anything he wanted for Christmas. He chose to get all of his skate gear from us, $500 worth, because he said that we replaced his deck months before. He could have been blowing smoke, but from then on we realized that it would make sense to change our return policy to include broken decks within a specific time period. Over the following years, that was one of the selling points that we had over our competition. We gained a certain amount of respect and trust as a result of that policy change. Turns out, returns of broken decks went up only slightly, but increased sells made up for it. We had also learned that our return policy was not written in stone.

Now, to bore you even more. I just wanted to highlight a situation that I had recently with Dell Computers that has significantly changed my opinion of them forever. I purchased a new Dell XPS M1530 laptop at the end of August that took them almost 2 weeks to build and ship. There were many things, from the check out to delivery that required me to interact with Dell customer service via phone, that I’ll spare you the detail on here. They finally finished my laptop and shipped it out on September 4, It was delivered on September 8. It had been more than two years since my last laptop purchase, and to say the least, I was excited. I actually, felt like a kid waiting for their skateboard to be delivered. Never-the-less, i got the computer, took a couple of days to get mostly everything set up, files moved over, and software installed. I then got back to business with client work and pretty much business as usual, but with my new laptop. For the next two weeks, I noticed that the computer moved slower than my previous laptop even though it had a lot more processing power and ram and just about everything else. Additionally, every time the computer would hibernate it would actually restart. Even worse, I would get the occasional blue screen, as well freezes and crashes and heat like it would catch on fire.  So, after dealing with this I decided I didn’t want that computer and wanted to return it, maybe exchange for a different Dell model, but definitely send it back.  So I tried contacting Dell several times on the 28th, every time would result in a disconnect. Eventually I sent them a email via their contact form. Additionally, I called the next morning and spoke with a live person, albeit a person that spoke very badly broken English and sounded as if the read from a que card. They informed me that they have a 21 day return policy and that there are no exceptions. Of course I asked to speak with a manager, and was told repeatedly that a manger would tell me the same thing and that there were no managers available to speak with me currently. I eventually did speak with a “manager” and was told the same thing that the earlier rep told me, 21 day return policy, no exceptions.  Screw it, I gave up and tried again the following day. Everyone read from the same que card. Since Dell has no showrooms where a potential customer can go and touch and feel the product, and I live in Austin. We have to take their word for it, that we’ll be receiving a quality product. You would think their return policy would be at least 30 days.

I figured if I was going to be stuck with the computer that didn’t work the way I had hoped, I should at least get Tech Support involved. I did, they had me run a bunch of test, they said it would take few hours to run all of the tests and that they would call me back at a agreed upon time to discuss the test results. Our agreed upon time was 9pm and guess what, no one called back. I suppose at some point I’ll have to call tech support to try and get them to replace the computer, but, I fear since the test looked like they ran without error, I’ll have a hard time convincing Dell that I have a lemon. So, I restored the laptop back to the factory settings with intentions of selling it. I’m not sure I would feel comfortable selling the laptop to someone else. What do I do? Either way, I’m currently stuck with $1,500 brick. I know one thing is for sure, coming from someone who has purchased over $100k in Dell servers and Desktops in the past, I will be very reluctant to do business with them in the future.

I refer back to my experience with skateboard.com and other customer oriented companies that I’ve worked with,  your return policy should be not written in stone.

P.S. If anyone wants a good deal on a “top of the line” line Dell laptop, just let me know.