I would like to say a few words about customer service. This is not a promotional blog about ChessBaron‘s own high standards, but rather a short contemplation on how companies set the bar for each other. First I’ll give Amazon a plug. I noticed that the keys were starting to wear on my Kindle after about 18 months usage, so I gave them a call about the matter. My expectation was that I’d probably get the “out of warranty … give you a small discount of a new one” type of routine. To my pleasant surprise Amazon very quickly acknowledged the problem and arranged for a brand new replacement to be sent out which I received in less than 48 hours from my call. Wow. In my experience that is rare service these days.

I will contrast that with the provider of our mobile phones services. I don’t care to name them here but the company is a leading provider in Canada. Only 2 months ago I purchased a new Sony Ericsson Experia Arc for my wife (her previous phone can now be viewed in the Royal Ontario Museum). We took the phone on our recent road trip loaded with music and ready to collect all sorts of photo and video memories on the generous 16Gb Micro SD card that came with the phone. However a few days into the trip the card failed. We lost the music, and would have lost all the photos and videos up to that point if we had not had the sense to back them up. Not only was the card unreadable, it also heated up the phone so that we could have cooked a small fillet mignon on it while we were camping. It was unfortunate, but we understand that hardware fails. The supplier can’t do much about that. What they can do is quickly rectify the problem, but in this case the company initially shirked all responsibility. The store referred me to the telephone support line. The telephone support line referred me to the store. They offered to send the whole phone off for repair which would have left my wife without a phone for two weeks. I was informed that the SD card was basically a freebie with the phone and not covered under warranty (a freebie that would cost $40-50 for me to replace). Eventually my tenacity won through and they funded another card and the phone works fine. But what a paaaaaiiiiinful process.

Returning to my initial comments it is important for customer oriented companies to learn from their own experiences with suppliers. The more we can put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and treat them as we would want to be treated, the more everyone wins. Sure we have to trade a little profit margin on occasion in exchange for some goodwill but that is part of running a good business. We do well to remember that in our highly interconnected world it is very easy to establish a good or bad reputation. Not only that, but providing good customer service is just the right thing to do, and is more satisfying not only for the customer, but also for the provider.