How many different companies do you think you use in a day, a week, a month for your personal transactions right through to business services? Well I know that we use loads and more often than not there is a problem.
All businesses encounter problems, delivery issues (why charge more to the Highlands – don’t get me started on that one!), stock issues, faulty or damaged goods, or as in the case of a recent transaction with Amazon, the order was lost completely. Who’s fault is it? Well I don’t really care to be honest I just want the goods that we ordered. So I went onto the Amazon website, went to my orders, found the one that still had not arrived, pressed contact us, said they hadn’t arrived and within 5 minutes – yes you did read that right – I got a response from Amazon that wasn’t one of these ‘thank you for your enquiry we will deal with it when we manage to get round to it’ replies, it was in good English and it answered my question. Now why, if a large and lets be honest enormous company like Amazon can manage good customer service, why can’t we all?
As a small business we pride ourselves on customer service, hate to think that a customer is let down by our lack of attention to detail or by not keeping them informed of anything, but our customer base is much more manageable than Amazon’s – so what makes them so different? We have a list of complaints from Blackberry to Vodafone, Scottish Hydro Electric to Intuit Quickbooks and all of them are large multinational companies and all of them fail miserably to deal with customers the way we should be dealt with.
Not quite sure what I am going to do about it other than my usual rant on our blog, but I am interested to hear your good and bad customer service experiences so we know who to use in the future and who to avoid like the plague… our current avoidance recommendation is the Morrisons Petrol Station at Fort William – rude staff – and our current hero is obviously Amazon 
 Who are your heroes and villains in the customer service world?
Amazon always blows me away with their customer service – excellent every time. I like buying from small local businesses where I can, and will sometimes even pay more to support them – but not at the expense of good service. An example: A couple of years ago, we wanted to buy new cameras. We knew what we wanted, and went into a local camera shop… where we were completely ignored while the two staff members chatted amongst themselves, despite us obviously trying to catch their eyes for help (they looked at us, but would just turn away again). We eventually did ask them to show us the cameras – they weren’t reluctant or rude, but did seem fairly ambivalent. So, we left, came home and bought the cameras (for less) from Amazon instead
Amazon’s customer is excellent, not despite them being a huge company, but (in my opinion) because they are a big company. They’ve really invested heavily in systemising their business and really have the process nailed. And it shows too.
Does that mean small businesses can’t offer great customer service that runs like clockwork? Definitely not. But it does have a cost.
In this age of (quite frankly) terrible customer service (and terrible provider service), those that are prepared to invest have a clear advantage over those that don’t.
Taryn, I am totally with you on your experience there and likewise we will try to buy local where possible (awaiting first organic veg box delivery this week) but I loathe bad customer service. And Lewis I agree with you about Amazon and also agree that if you take the time to provide good service customers will return the favour.
Just to prove the point that it is not all bad, Laithwaites wine this morning called because we cancelled our subscription – I can not fault the service we are now receiving, just a shame it took bad service to escalate it to this level thats all.