Great customer service is the key to successful business

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Canada where the staff at the local pizza joint the answer the phone in a cheery voice “It’s a wonderful day a pizza delight, how may I help you.” Or maybe because I believe that treating people how you’d like to be treated is a no brainer. Whatever it is I believe customer service is the key to successful business and if done well it can put your business ahead of the pack.

It doesn’t cost much to be polite, to treat your customers how you would like to be treated. I’ve been brainstorming. Coming up with examples of companies where I’ve had a great experience. It didn’t take long to come up with a list, the list isn’t long, the names of these places are at the tip of my tongue. I recommended them to people time and again and tell the stories of my experiences with these companies to anyone who will listen. I’m passionate about great customer service!

For example, I recently went to a friend’s wedding where I was “unofficial photographer”. They didn’t have an official photographer. It wasn’t your typical wedding but a whole weekend affair, set in a gorgeous village in Italian wine country, reception at the castle, BBQ on a vineyard. I took over 800 photos, spent ages narrowing it down to 150 and decided to make them an iPhoto album as a wedding gift. If any of you have gone through this process before, you know it’s an agonising, time consuming affair. Having reviewed the album several times with a fine tooth comb to make sure I chose the best ones, there were no duplicates and all photos were in the right order, I was ready to send it off. £87 later, all I had to do is wait for it to arrive.

About a week later the album arrived. It was gorgeous. Having had several albums printed in this way before I knew it would be. However, there was one snag. There were 2 photos on a page where I expected there to be only 1. This photo was in my top 3 out of the over 800 I took and I wanted it full page to be shown in all it’s glory. Instead, there was another photo sharing the page, a duplicate that was used later in the album and from another part of the story. I was pretty disappointed. The album was perfect otherwise.

I had a read through Apple’s terms for returning a defective order. It didn’t look good. However, they wrote their terms in such a positive way (despite dealing with a negative situation) that it made me think, they care about my order, I’ll write in and see what they suggest.

I sent an email through to Apple explaining the situation. Also that I purchase all of my albums through them and that I had always been happy with the result.

Within 8 hours I had a reply. It wasn’t your usual canned response. Instead a personal email from Dustin thanking me for my email, apologising and explaining how the file is sent to them and encouraging me to preview the PDF file in future right before I click “BUY”. He also said: “Because you are dissatisfied with the order, I have made an exception to the iPhoto sales policies and issued a full refund in the amount of £87.80.” He closed by apologising again and asking me to contact him to let him know if this issue has been resolved to my satisfaction.

What did this cost Apple? The cost of printing 1 x 52 page album.

What did they get? A very happy customer who will order time and again, go on recommending the service to friends and family and share the story of a great customer service experience will ANYONE who will listen.