CompUSA: The Smell Lingers ...

If every there was a reason to provide great customer service, the lingering anger customers feel toward the now defunct CompUSA should give you pause. In the last week - I cannot tell you why -- two different people have talked disparagingly about their terrible experience shopping a the stores. Russell Shaw's post, "CompUSA is Closing for Good. Good" says it all.

Adios CompUSA?

I found out in December that CompUSA was closing its doors because it's losing money. I am not surprised; I've been in my local CompUSA and watched employees actively avoid engaging with customers who clearly were looking for help.

Really. I'm not kidding: I've watched employees in their red shirts almost run the other way. The Emeryville, California store is notorious for this.

Much to my surprise, however, was that I also discovered (when doing a bit of research on the supposed store closings) that the company was purchased by Mexico's magnate, Carlos Slim. So it got me wondering: could CompUSA's poor customer service -by American standards, mind you - be the result of cultural differences in customer service standards?

The stores appear still open, so now I wonder what's really going on.

I'm So Happy, Oh So Happy ...

Oh yes, I am happy, because (a) I had to get a new bookkeeper and it turned out to be the best thing that's happened this month; and (b) Rhonda, my new bookkeeper, has amazing customer service. No - I mean it: so far, top-notch eye-popping service.

It started with her giving me her client agreement to sign. Here's what it states:

Our telephone is monitored between the hours of 7am to 7pm, and it is our policy that if we cannot take your phone call immediately, we will return your call within one hour.

This client agreement was such a shock to me: rather than the usual mumbo-jumbo, it was a bit less than one page and a whole paragraph laid out her customer service credo.

Do you think I wanted to sign this agreement?!? Oh yeah, despite the fact that I was spending money. And with that start, Rhonda turned this whole process from one of pain to one of (hopefully inestimable) gain.

I look forward to blogging about how the process proceeds over the next year.

Go Rhonda!

There's No Escape ...

Listen: no business is immune anymore from having dirty customer service laundry aired in public in the most frightful way. A call between a Dell rep and an angry customer illustrates this.

In essence, the customer was upset because he spent an hour on an automated system trying to find out how to turn off a laptop stuck in shut down mode. At the end of the call, he is told by the human Dell customer service representative to hold down the power button for 1o seconds. But the caller, by that time, was agitated almost to the breaking point (warning: the strongest language is involved).

While the Dell rep does not stoop to yelling back and appears calm, the smirk in his voice clearly comes through, and makes Dell look bad, bad, bad – really worse than if the rep had yelled back. The answer is to be authentic. No one would have blamed the rep if he’d complained about the behavior of the customer: that would have been an authentic, truly human response. There’s only one way to get respect here that I see, and that’s to just honestly care about how much time the customer’s wasted.