Again with the customer service…

Posted on | March 7, 2009 | No Comments

I have a friend who runs a very successful small business doing 3d modeling.  He works for himself full time and gets to enjoy watching his kids grow I asked him what he considered to be the most important aspect to his success.

You must figure out how to serve your customers the best possible way you can, worry about that and nothing else, forget money and profit, serve them well and the money will follow.

Now it may sound corny to some but it was an amazingly simple statement that summed up everything. Matt takes his customer service very seriously.  If you’re in the market for 3D models or want to list models, use him.  He isn’t the first, but he does it better than the rest.

There are rarely truly new business ideas.  Ones that revolutionize the world.  Look at even new technologies like Facebook.  MySpace was around before it and even they weren’t the first.  I remember hearing about Friendster years ago before either of them.  Social networking was new back then but the dominant player in the market wasn’t the first out of the gate.  Why has Facebook been successful?  They served  their customers better than the others.  They responded to their needs

Now take PayPal, a similar story.  There are other companies who handle payment but PayPal has done a great job of making it easy.  As a result, they are the dominant player in online payments.  Now it’s not because they have great sservice, they don’t.  They are among the worst companies to deal with as a user.  I had an issue where they were trying to take the monthly fee out of a new Bank of America account I’d setup instead of the company credit card.  Well they charged it, Bank of America hit me with a $25 NSF fee which is ridiculous way to make money, and then PayPal said they’d try again in three days.  I called PayPal and offered the credit card and the money in the PayPal account but he said there was nothing he could do, it was already scheduled.

Now knowing a thing or two about moving money around and ACH this is a complete crock.  You can stop it, PayPal chooses not to allow their agens to do this.  And the credit card is setup as the backup, so why not charge the credit card when the checking account fails?  It is, after all, very explicitly listed as the “backup funding source”.  So in the end, I have to transfer money from my PalPal account to my checking account so PayPal can transfer it back.

Had PayPal said no problem, we’ll bill your card I’d have been happy.  Had they offered to refund me $25 NSF fee I’d have been thrilled.  To make me happy would cost them nothing, to make me a customer for life would have cost them $25.  That’s less than my monthly fee.  PayPal could have made a customer for life but they opted not to help out at all.  Throwing their hands up in defeat or at least indifference.

We want to be make customer service a memorable experience for the right reasons.  Remember, Crowd Rent empowers all it’s people to solve your problem.  There is no one working with us that will need to ask a supervisor or transfer you to another department.  We want our customers, who have put their faith in us, to expect more from us.  We demand good service from others and we expect to offer our customers nothing less than exceptional service.  It’s our way of saying thank you.

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