This morning I had a great customer service experience.  I will share it with you.  I will even name names.  I want you to ask yourself whether your own customer care organization could do this for your customers.  If not, maybe you should give us a call here at Eventus.

One of my hobbies is digital photography.  Given I’m a Mac user, I started using Apple’s Aperture product when it first came out.  I’ve been using it ever since.  It is particularly good at organizing large library of digital photograph files.  You may be thinking the company that gave me the great experience last night was Apple.  They have done so many times in the past, but last night, it actually wasn’t them.  I’m just providing this info about Apple for background and context.  Keep reading!

I have enough digital photos that I store them on an external 1 TB hard drive I purchased from Other World Computers (a.k.a. OWC) (www.macsales.com). It takes a lot of digital photographs to make a dent in a 1TB drive, but I have done so.

I actually have two of these drives, one for primary storage and one for local backup.  I have been a happy OWC customer for years.  They are very popular in the Mac user community because they have a great selection of Mac-related products and good prices.

Last night I noticed the power supply for one of the external drives was not working.  Since I had two identical drives, I was able to easily swap power supplies and determine the problem.  I found my receipt and saw that I had purchased these drives back in 2010.  I went onto OWC’s website, found the Contact Us option and dashed off an email asking whether I could get a replacement power supply.

I then stayed on the site to browse for some other technical trinkets I was thinking about buying.  At one point I noticed a listing of disk drive accessories, including power supplies.  In that area, I quickly found exactly the power supply I needed.  So I ordered it.  I figured that would be the end of the story.

This morning, I woke up to find an email from Rebecca R at OWC.  Here is the (slightly edited) email she sent me:

Dear Mike,

Thank you for contacting OWC customer support. I see that you have already ordered the power supply. If you have any questions feel free to contact me again. Thank you and have a great day!

Sincerely,

OWC Rebecca R

Customer Service Rep

This was a WOW moment for me.  First of all, her response was waiting for me at 7 am Mountain time, even though it was regarding a relatively small purchase I had made four years ago. Second, knowing as I do a few things about customer care operations and systems, it was obvious that OWC gives its customer service reps outstanding information about its customers.

Not many companies give their reps access to their order entry systems.  Shipped product information is commonly pushed to customer support systems, but this was an order I had just placed a few hours before that had not yet been fulfilled.  However, in this case, Rebecca had this information, was able to see that I had managed to solve my own problem, and was able to let me know she was still there to help if needed.

So my question is – if this scenario happened at your company, would your service reps be able to handle my case this elegantly?  I will certainly buy more products from OWC in the future.  Do you have the same ability to generate increased loyalty among your customers?

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