brown squirrel on black background 
Photo by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash
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Customer Support from Nightmares to Dreams

Reframing bad experiences

This is the first “ and Baby Animal Face” posting I have written in a long time.

Yesterday was a rough day; I had the worst customer service experience in my life. That's quite a high bar.

The instructions from customer support unrecoverably destroyed an expensive and relatively hard-to-replace device. It took three phone calls, four hours, and four phone trees to get to the point where they gave me instructions that they knew (but did not warn me) would destroy the device. They had a plan and promised to send me a free replacement promptly. All I needed to do was call them back with some order information they couldn't look up. When I called back with the order number and ticket number, they took an hour to ask me dumb questions, could not find the call ticket, and then refused to replace the device. They couldn't find a supervisor for me to speak to. The promised return call from the supervisor never came.

Our research project is on hold until we can get a replacement device. No one has them in stock.

Today's gratitude and baby animal picture go out to everyone who gives satisfactory customer service who I had not previously appreciated. While I had publicly and privately thanked individuals that provided exceptional customer service, I had taken the many satisfactory organizations for granted.

To you, I give both my thanks and my humble apologies. We should never take for granted the people who competently work to keep our world running.

Written by Russell Brand

Entrepreneur in residence at Founder Institute, he has mentored, performed due diligence on and invested in numerous early stage companies. Hundreds of these early stage companies have described Russell’s insights and advice as the most useful thing in the history of their companies. He has always had an inborn ability to find more valuable uses of new ideas and faster ways to achieve results.

 

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