I had an all-too-rare experience yesterday. I went to the TNT web site to check on a delivery and saw there was a delay. I needed to know if the box was to be delivered before the next day (it was already a day late) so I clicked on the "contact us" link, which was easy to find at the top right of the site. I filled out the info, submitted and got an auto-ack from them saying "someone will contact you...".

What I expected from years of experience on the web

An email quoting all the data I entered on the form and a final line saying "Entered on web site", followed by a line added by an employee saying "You can find tracking information on our web site."

What actually happened

Within an hour, a human being phoned, explained that there had been a routing error (this was noted on the site) and gave me an honest estimate of delivery. "Probably not today."

So, because of a routing error, my package from Shanghai will be 2 days late; why am I pleased with this company? Because errors happen, service doesn't. A rapid and honest answer to a query is something you don't get in this day and age. Look at your bank. In this country, they don't even have tellers anymore, just people who point you to the ATM. Many banks have surcharged numbers if you need to talk to someone. When you pay for service, whether it's transport, banking, phone, electricity, part of the service is... well, service.

Ebay, Paypal, Orange do not care about their users, customer experience or service. They just want your money.

 Listen, Google

What part of "preferred language" do you not understand?

Every browser has a list of languages the user would like to see, in order of preference. I even tried to remove French from this list, but

No matter what I do, when I am in France, my language is set to French, except where I can change them manually (gmail, google apps).

photo www.ronmartin.net

Ok, this doesn't affect huge numbers of people, but hey, a lot of social networking folks are on the road a lot.

I just tried to join Social Wok using my Gmail address and then my Google Apps addres. Both are set to English. Yet, in both cases, French was imposed on the initial signup and it isn't changeable. (The signup submit was shown in French, I can read French but what if I was in Turkey, China or even Germany?)

So, I brought up a proxy, making my IP look like it was in New York, and guess what?

Google now shows me as an English speaker. Dammit, what about the browser prefs I set to English?

 

Make it easy for users to change language settings and retain these

If you can't find a way to read the browser settings and respect these (and any beginner programmer knows how to do this, so don't pretend it's difficult), at least put a language selector in a very visible place. This isn't just me, there are countless threads about every Google product asking how to change the language. It took them two years to fix YouTube!

I've already mentioned what a great job Amazon did handling my accidental order of two copies of the same DVD. What about experiences before Web 2.0? The fact is, companies have had to deal with customer satisfaction throughout the history of western civilization, not just since Twitter and GetSatisfaction made it so public.

 I recall an incident where we stayed at a Comfort Inn in Monterey California. We had a series of unpleasant experiences there, and when we returned home, I wrote their corporate office using a contact form on their site. Within a few hours, I got an international phone call from a woman who showed unobsequious but sincere concern for the incidents. She apologized and asked me what the price of the room was, then sent me a check for the full price plus a couple for 45% off of a future stay. Note she didn't ask for proof that I paid the price I said. Did it help? That incident took place at least 10 years ago, and I still remember it well! The positive outweighed the negative.

 More recently I purchased a $45 technical book subtitled "The Complete Reference". The book was a huge disappointment and a friend of mine said "you should have looked at Amazon reviews" and sent a link. I looked and there were dozens of reviews with the identical complaints I had with the book: it was not only not definitive at all, leaving out huge areas of knowledge, but also was not about the version of Solaris mentioned but a rehash of the previous version. Those of us who purchased this book for it to be a ripoff. "Very Disappointing", "Misleading and Inaccurate", "Do Not Buy". Indeed, next time I will look at Amazon reviews. (I think I purchased the book elsewhere so I didn't see them at the time.)

 I wrote to the publisher, thinking I'd never get an answer. I was wrong: I got an immediate email telling me to choose any book from their catalog and they'd send me a copy, free. Note: Not "a book of equivalent value" ANY book. And also note, they sent it express to Europe, doubling the cost to them. Again, I remember the incident years later and I have the feeling they really care about their reputation for customer satisfaction.

 So there are companies who do it right: Amazon, Comfort Inn, and McGraw-Hill Osborne Media and I won't forget them.

 My latest consumer expectations and outcome is described here on FastCompany.com http://tr.im/VMWareRefund

We take a hiatus from ribald tales and stories of music, celebrity and controlled substances to focus on a serious issue. The bane of our times, SERVICE.
 
In our core business, since the financial crisis we have been given an ultimatum by two customers to cut our rates by half. We can't do this for several reasons, the most important of which is that the work we do for them is not inspiring or even interesting. I do have some information for companies like these who want to reduce the rates they pay for ongoing contracts. Be careful what you wish for. I can see the DNS still isn't properly configured for the customer who left for a cheaper solution. It still points to the old server!
 
Service doesn't scale well
 
I can have terrific Internet connectivity in France for under $50, so why do we pay double that in two locations? Because the day I need to contact my ISP, I call a normal phone number and I immediately speak to a human being who evaluates my problem and either connects me with someone who can act or is able to launch the service process. If I am connected, I can email them and get a valid response within an hour. On the other hand, Orange offers very cheap and usually decent connectivity (it's the same DSLAM and physical lines, after all) but Orange wasted several weeks of my time and never got our second line connected.
 
Hosting is dirt cheap. Years ago we paid $25 per month to rent web space that was a few megabytes and would serve a single customer. Now we can host gigabytes on Amazon S3 or CloudFront servers for a few dollars a month. It isn't the hosting our customers pay for, we offer that free of charge to them. In other words, it matters little how many email addresses they need or how much web space, these costs are trivial and we don't even consider them in billing anymore.
 
What the world needs now (besides "Love, sweet love") is service, good service
 
I bought some software the other day. Although he was on vacation, the creator exchanged a few emails with me to make sure the purchase went well. This is service. When we are on vacation, we can always be reached by email and usually by phone. I know how much our customers appreciate our reachability and none of them have ever abused this service.
 
As a consumer, I recently closed an account with a computer supplies company from whom we'd been ordering for several years. They are not the cheapest, but I wasn't looking for cheap, I was an am looking for service. This company made it so hard to apply a refund that I left them with the $80 to avoid further waste of my time. The company lost my business forever over an issue they could have easily resolved.
 
I pity service providers whose clients don't get how hard they work but thankfully, our own customer base cleanses itself.

Tuning up is the bane of the mandolin player. I wish I had spelled bane correctly in the title. Thanks @voyagerfan5761 for the correction!

Poor service is the bain bane of our existence, yet we have the means to fix it. Email works, has proven laborious due to spam and other problems. Telephone hotlines are too immediate in some cases, and some things require research and a call back. Having used these, the agent often does not call back.
 
Twitter could be the most valuable customer satisfaction tool ever invented. GetSatisfaction.com isn't bad, but it's too laborious for the user. Twitter on the other hand could resolve a lot of problems with a simple trick. For one thing, the user is already registered. The 140-character limitation is a blessing. Once contact is made and an agent dispached, the rest can be handled via email. In cases that can quickly be solved, every return tweet giving the solution or confirming the resolution is like an advertisement showing how good the service is.
 
Using the Twitter API, build an (probably AIR) application that allows a single Twitter username to receive and log DM and Tweets, delivering them to one or more logged in agents, just like a call center. The agents can communicate on a back channel via Twitter, IRC or any IM. Every message sent and received is timestamped recorded in a database. An auto DM is sent to the [potential or current] customer after the first received message saying "we're on it" and the agent assigned figures out what to do and executes it.