I feel compelled to contrast two fruitful experiences I had this week when trying to buy things, as the one was so good and the other was so bad.
A busy lunchtime last Friday I walked into the Apple store in the Bullring to buy my son's birthday present. I walked straight to the tills at the back of the store, told a friendly sales assistant what I wanted; he took the item out of a drawer next to him, already packaged, took my payment by credit card, checked my email address was correct, and told me my receipt and warranty had been sent to my inbox. The whole process took a few minutes and I was genuinely happy to hand over my money.
For the last 2 weeks I have been trying to change the billing address and name on my broadband account with an anonymous (yet colourfully named) provider. I estimate I have spent around 3 - 4 hours on the phone or on hold in that time, and on one occasion, spoke to 3 different teams, only to be asked to call the original team back and then be cut off! The jewel in the crown of this experience was when they refused to recognise my date of birth, repeating 1971 as if I was to blame for being born in that year! I am now determined to change my provider to avoid ever having to to through that again.
There is no excuse - we consumers demand value and efficiency, or we will go elsewhere!
In fact, the only time and place that over-efficiency causes problems is a the self-serve checkout at Tesco ... try to be too efficient at getting your items into the bag and the machine barks "unexpected item in the bagging area", causing you to go back and repeat the swipe again with everyone else now watching you!
PS I have just this minute received a call from the customer services team at my broadband provider saying they have just picked up the message I left on their answer phone 3 DAYS AGO and are ringing me back to help ... is it me?!
A busy lunchtime last Friday I walked into the Apple store in the Bullring to buy my son's birthday present. I walked straight to the tills at the back of the store, told a friendly sales assistant what I wanted; he took the item out of a drawer next to him, already packaged, took my payment by credit card, checked my email address was correct, and told me my receipt and warranty had been sent to my inbox. The whole process took a few minutes and I was genuinely happy to hand over my money.
For the last 2 weeks I have been trying to change the billing address and name on my broadband account with an anonymous (yet colourfully named) provider. I estimate I have spent around 3 - 4 hours on the phone or on hold in that time, and on one occasion, spoke to 3 different teams, only to be asked to call the original team back and then be cut off! The jewel in the crown of this experience was when they refused to recognise my date of birth, repeating 1971 as if I was to blame for being born in that year! I am now determined to change my provider to avoid ever having to to through that again.
There is no excuse - we consumers demand value and efficiency, or we will go elsewhere!
In fact, the only time and place that over-efficiency causes problems is a the self-serve checkout at Tesco ... try to be too efficient at getting your items into the bag and the machine barks "unexpected item in the bagging area", causing you to go back and repeat the swipe again with everyone else now watching you!
PS I have just this minute received a call from the customer services team at my broadband provider saying they have just picked up the message I left on their answer phone 3 DAYS AGO and are ringing me back to help ... is it me?!
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