A+ Customer Service

Published on March 28, 2007 By OckhamsRazor In Consumer Issues

This blog ends with a positive kudo to a great company, so please read it all

I've noticed a trend in the money making industry in the last - oh - 10 years or so. It's not so much a trend as it is a method of making money. It goes like this.

Promise the world with a money back guarantee (for whatever crap you're selling) and then challenge the consumer to jump through all the right hoops to actually get their money back. It's a war of attrition that adds up to big dollars. Most folks just don't have the staying power to get back what is rightfully theirs. And if a few do - no biggy. It's a way smaller percentage than the percentage of those who just "eat their own mistake." Ah - the American Way?

There's another phenomenon I have noticed in the last same 10 or so years. When you call a product manufacturer with a problem, customer service is limited to a set number of problems that exist in some book. If your problem isn't a casebook example of something in that book, the person on the other end of the phone doesn't have the foggiest clue what to do (since they can't read you the stock answer). To make matters worse, they're all jaded. Jaded by an endless litany of idiots who call in with retarded questions, and so by default, you often get treated as if you're a card carrying drooler. I hate calling for help almost more than anything because of this very fact. If I have to answer "Yes, of course I turned the power to the unit on" one more time...

Anyway...that isn't the point of this here blog

The point is that I just received some A+ customer service, and I think giving credit where credit is due is my responsibility given that I've watched the United States get dumber and dumber every year. I want to encourage people to understand that *thinking* customer service agents are not only a rare breed, but a much needed and valuable one.

So who is it? Turbine, Entertainment.

Turbine Entertainment is a company that makes video games. Their claim to video fame is Asheron's Call 1 and 2, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and the soon to hit the streets Lord of the Rings Online - a game my wife and I are looking most forward to. In fact, we played in their closed beta and are preparing to play in the open beta using preorder registration keys. There was only one problem.

We live in Italy, and due to an agreement between the European server people and the US server people, we could not enter our US-based keys for acceptance because our IP addresses were clearly not from the US. So, I called customer service - awash with dread.

Here's what these guys didn't do. They didn't fix my problem (yet). They didn't bullshit me.

Here's what they did do. They were extremely polite, but not obsequious. They understood the "out of the norm" problem I had without me having to relay it to them in one syllable words . They took my contact information, explained what was going wrong, told me how they were going to fix it, when I would hear something back from them, and were totally professional in every way - without sounding as if their professionalism was simply a passenger on my wallet. I actually hung up the phone thinking "Hey if they can fix this, great, but if not, no hard feelings - that was a VERY pleasant call." The customer service was very genuine, with every emphasis on the meaning of that word, and in today's world, that deserves my shout out of approval.

Credit where credit is due. Nice job, Turbine. Even if I can't play your game while in Italy, I'll catch you next time around when I'm back in the states. Thanks for being honest. That's way more important to me than killing orcs.

Comments

Texas Wahine

on Mar 28, 2007

Nice.

OckhamsRazor

on Mar 29, 2007

For what it's worth (and that's a lot to me) they fixed the problem, and we're playing the game from Italy. Again, nice job, Turbine.

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