Week 1 EOC - Great Customer Service

Customer service is a fickle thing. Some people care about it and others just work at a place to get the job done. What is the secret behind good customer service, and what makes it a major player in the marketing industry today? According to marketing professionals “[t]oday’s successful companies have one thing in common: Like Zappos, they are strongly customer-focused and heavily committed to marketing. These companies share a passion for understanding and satisfying customer needs in well-defined target markets. They motivate everyone in the organization to help build lasting customer relationships based on creating value.” (Armstrong, Gary, and Philip Kotler. Marketing: An Introduction, 10th Edition. Pearson Learning Solutions, 2010. VitalBook file.). I personally rarely have good customer service experiences, and am frequently acquainted with employees who provide the bare minimum service in order to keep their jobs. I also understand this considering most customers you meet in certain industries tend to treat the common worker with disdain or blatant disregard including treating them like they aren’t as good of people as they themselves. On the rare occasion you meet that person that genuinely loves what they do, and loves helping the customer out. The only good customer service experience I can really recall is with Fry’s Electronics here in Las Vegas. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about this particular experience other than the fact that the employee seemed to actually care about resolving my issue at the time. I ended up having my computer break down over the holiday and spent one grand on new computer parts from Newegg in order to build a new tower. I was in fact incredibly disappointed because of this company, and Newegg ended up sending me 600 dollars out of the 1000 in parts that were faulty to begin with. In addition to that issue they then insisted that I pay for the same parts again and wait for them to be shipped out again which had already been an issue because it took over 15 days to get the faulty products to begin with. When I contacted Fry’s Electronics concerned about what to do, they couldn’t help me with my monetary concerns however they insisted on helping me out with newer, similarly priced products which would help my situation in the interim. This customer service representative went into deep detail with what I used the computer for, and what exactly I needed for the parts. It was through this attention to detail that I spent the same amount of money on parts to get newer better models for my new tower and even offered to help over the phone if I had any issues setting the parts up. I’m still dealing with the negative customer service from Newegg, but I can tell you that the customer service Fry’s Electronics provided me with actually helped not only their own company, but also saved Newegg’s butt because I ended up using the 3 products I paid for that weren’t faulty.