I just had a very nice experience with Concept2, the company that makes the rowing machine I spend a lot of time sitting on. The electronic monitor on my machine has been throwing errors for a while, which doesn’t really hurt much but it’s annoying in the middle of a row. So I finally got around to emailing them about it. Turns out they use Zendesk to manage their support inquiries, which I have seen before only because Kim just started using it at Harp Column.
Anyway, it turns out that the monitor on my rowing machine, which is about 5 years old, was from a batch they have had consistent problems with and they are sending me a replacement for free. Good customer service, that. The only way to do better would have been not have the problem in the first place.
Consider, though, the amount of effort it took to make that customer service good:
- They had to be tracking complaints about this particular performance monitor
- They had to have a tracking system in place
- They had to have a team of people trained to use the tracking system
- They had to have a way to replace defective bits for customers — spare parts, etc.
- They had to build into the product a way for customers to check what version it was to tell the support team
- Finally, they had to have the actual will to be good at customer service
I used to think that just having a policy of caring about customers and being nice to them was sufficient. Turns out it requires much more effort than that.
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