My co-worker Rob (who reads this blog, so watch what you say) sometimes handles things a little differently than I do.  I hear him arguing with people on the phone from time to time, and he likes using phrases like, “Wait wait wait, let me get this straight,” “Hold on, let me make sure I understand what you’re saying here,” and a very sarcastic, “Thanks, you’ve been a great help.”  He now knows that I’m listening when he starts getting that tone, so he said something specifically for me while arguing with someone on the phone last week: “Hold on hold on, are you in customer service?  Then how ’bout you try SERVICING THE CUSTOMER?!”  He knew I’d like that one, and he was right.  That little exchange leads me to two recent incidents involving customer service and people actually servicing the customer…whether they should’ve or not.

In December, my parents bought a two-seater wagon for our adorable twins.  They weren’t yet a year old at the time, so I didn’t open it to try putting it together for months.  When I did, the box appeared to be missing the giant (and very necessary) handle that pushes or pulls the wagon when the kids are in it.  I’m historically bad at seeing things when they’re right in front of my face, so I went back to the box two more times over the next couple of weeks to confirm that it was really missing.  Once assured that I wasn’t situationaly blind, I went to the website of the company that makes the wagon.

The site had an online form for customer service requests, including a space specifically for missing parts.  I wrote a nice email and made sure to mention how we couldn’t wait to use their great product.  They replied the next day with an email saying that if the product was under warranty, they’d send me a replacement one.  I asked my lovely wife about that and she said, “Your parents bought it from Amazon, so I’ll just contact them and see if they can help us.”  After a lengthy online chat with Amazon’s customer service department, we were set.  The only way it could work was for us to send back the whole wagon (on their dime, nicely) and get a new, complete box in return.   That seemed fair enough (since they didn’t carry replacement parts for everything sold on their site), and we went about the process.  As expected, a brand new wagon came in the mail with all of the necessary pieces.  What I didn’t expect was a separate box on another day addressed to me.  I opened it up and found a long plastic handle.  “Per email inquiry,” said the note inside from the wagon company.  My first thought was, “Well that was nice of them!”  Then I thought about it a little longer and had two more thoughts.  First, “They said it needed to be under warranty and I never wrote them back at all.  They took that to mean…it was?”  Second, “Why couldn’t they just tell me that they were sending me a new handle so we wouldn’t have to do the whole Amazon process and have me lug a big box into a UPS Store for no reason?”  Despite those questions, it was refreshing to see a company try to do right by their customers.

The thing about that story as compared to the next one is that I actually deserved the assistance I received.  I can’t say the same for the main character of this next tale.

That same co-worker Rob and I went to the Coffee Bean right near our office a little while ago.  I’m normally a pretty good eavesdropper, but I had missed a lot of the conversation between a customer and an employee, both women in their early 20s.  There was something about an iced drink melting and the employee eventually (but begrudgingly) saying she would remake the drink but “only this one time.”  After we walked out, Rob asked me if I’d heard the conversation.  “Kinda,” I said.  “My best guess from contextual clues was that they called her name to say her iced drink was ready, but she didn’t come in and get it for ten minutes.  Then she complained that it was melted.”  “Oh no,” Rob said, “You missed the best part of the whole thing.”  He went on to recap the whole story (which he’d paid close attention to instead of whatever I’d been saying to him at the time).  The employee made the iced drink, called the customer’s name, and the customer picked it up before sitting down at a table with her friends.  Ten minutes later, she went up to complain that it had melted.  Why had it melted?  Because she sat there holding it for ten minutes outside while talking with her friends instead of, ya know, drinking the damn thing.  It’s the exact equivalent of someone ordering a hot coffee, waiting until it got cold, and then complaining that s/he wanted a new one made because it’s supposed to be hot.  It’s that ridiculous, and yet the employee knew that the end result should always be having a happy customer, so she did her job.

I can’t help but wonder what I would do in those customer service positions when faced with the same situations.  When I think about it honestly, I end up being more of an asshole in both scenarios.  If the wagon owner never replied to say that it was indeed under warranty, I would never think to just go ahead and send the handle anyway.  And if I were that Coffee Bean employee, I would definitely have thrown in some more sarcastic lines about how “actually drinking your drink is where most of the enjoyment comes from.”  One thing is for sure: I would’ve enjoyed hearing Rob play the Coffee Bean employee role.  “Hold on, let me get this straight…”

Tags: coffee, customer service, wagon