welcome to china

Rate your customs inspector at PVG airport: Greatly Satisified? Satisfied? Basically satisfied? or Not Satisfied? Imagine if TSA instituted this.

I'm blogging long distance for a couple of weeks from Shanghai. So posts might be even more sporadic than usual.

Sinophile friends can follow me on my tumblr.

problems with twitter? welcome to the twilight zone

You may have heard that Twitter is revolutionizing customer service, providing the platform whereby companies riddled with terrible reputations for customer service are now redeeming their good names. Comcast, Home Depot, Dell and others have set up Twitter accounts and assigned employees to lurk online, browsing Twitter Search for disgruntled consumers having trouble with their service, enabling the company to swoop in to solve a complaint instantly or put the complainer in touch with someone who can help.

You'd think that Twitter, ultimately responsible for changing the customer service paradigm, would be at the forefront of customer service themselves. You would be wrong.

A week ago, my twitter account began to have problems. At first, things went well. Help on Twitter's dashboard launched me into a website with the promising name of Get Satisfaction. But, it turned out to be a dispiriting place-- a repository for complaints about not just Twitter but "thousands of companies" where questions go unanswered for weeks, even even though the site claims "Twitter is here! 21 people are listening and participating!" A complaint similar to mine posted 2 months ago is followed by a happy face inviting me "to be the first to reply!" A sidebar asks the dispiriting question: "Know any helpful people? Email this question to them!"

It takes some time to post my complaint because, as is par for Twitter, parameters must be strictly adhered to. The first is: Give your problem a great title. Really? Seems just when your service is pissing me off, Twitter, is not the right moment to ask me to be creative. But. Whatever. I fill in a description of the problem, ("one or two paragraphs work best!"), come up with tags (couldn't Twitter make a bot do this?) then comes the most annoying parameter of all. "One last thing before you post…how does this problem make you feel?" My choices are four emoticons (I hate emoticons) : smiley, sad, serious, tongue sticking out. After choosing one (you can guess) I must "describe my feelings in words" to "increase the likelihood of my problem getting noticed." Really? Questions aren't answered in queue, Twitter decides which to answer depending on how people articulate their feelings?

Luckily, I must have chosen the right words, because my problem is addressed within the hour. Unfortunately, the answer is: we can't answer this, you have to post this problem on the twitter help site. But I thought this was the twitter help site? I log onto the new URL provided and go through the "fill in the boxes" thing again.

Days go by. (Days in twitter-time are equivalent to centuries.) I log back into Get Satisfaction (which must be the world's most ironically named website) to ask when I might be hearing from Twitter. It takes several more days for them to respond. Vaguely: "Unfortunately, it really does take some time before we see a response from Twitter Support because they're dealing with a backlog."

Twitter has no customer service phone number (naturally) but they do post a snail mail address. So I sit down and write an old-fashioned letter. Wouldn't it be ironic if it turns out that snail-mail is what it takes to get Twitter's attention? It's been 7 days and still no word from them. C'mon, Twitter. If you care about users (and some say that you don't) why not put some of that $15 million of venture into dealing with the customers you already have?

UPDATE
Twitter's @crystal (who kindly replied in a comment) worked doggedly to fix the problem and solved it w/in 24 hours. Thanks, Crystal! The lesson? If you've got a problem with twitter, forget their help desk. Post your problem to @crystal to Get Satisfaction.

attention shoppers: it's better in the midwest

As I think I've mentioned, I've grown inured to lack of customer service, grown accustomed to sales clerks who avoid eye contact as they ring up my stuff, chatting loudly in a language I can't understand, not to me but to the clerk in the next aisle; I've come to expect that returning something to a store is such an onerous process that I'm inclined to keep the unwanted item if I can't mail it back…so imagine my delight to discover that customer service still exists, alive and well in the American Midwest. Here, clerks make small talk, looking you straight in the eye. Friendly folks greet you as you walk in the door. Savvy retailers, instead of relegating customer service to a dim, dusty closet in the back of the store, build huge, brightly lit counters positioned by the front door! Like New York stores attracting shoppers with Euros made fat by the devalued dollar, Midwest stores could lure streams of jaded shoppers from New York by advertising lower prices and upgraded shopping experience.

more kindle love

from someone besides me. George Tannenbaum likens Amazon customer service rep to Mother Theresa.

My Kindle appeared to have died. I was panicked. It didn't turn on and didn't seem to be charging. Was it $400 down the tubes? Or two hours on hold down the tubes?

I went to "manage my kindle" and typed my phone number in a "field" that said something like "call me." Within 10 seconds--yes, 10 seconds of typing my number--I got a call back from an eastern Washington sales rep.

Full adulation here.

amazon delivers!

Turns out the new Kindle they promised me to replace the dying one arrived DAYS AGO. (Our doormen pride themselves on being not just doormen but musicians and other creative types who sometimes can't be bothered to attend to mind-numbing details of running a building.) It is BEAUTIFUL. Pristine. And so easy to refill, a boomer can do it. You just go to the amazon site, pull down a tab and press download for every purchased item you want to reload. Mit out vire. Magic, to see the new Jhumpa Lahiri (Unaccustomed Earth-it's great, don't listen to snark talk) and Ha Jin's A Free Life and old faves like Cheever and Woolf appear, unabridged, in the palm of my hand. Yes, I had a question or two along the way (like how to I unsubscribe to Boing Boing which, in my initial kindlemania I thought was a good idea to pay for, when I can read it for free all I want on a Mac.) Each time I called, my call was answered promptly by a speaker of English who never had to take TOEFEL.

Why can't more mega-sellers be so customer friendly? Endured two hours of torture this morning trying to get someone at Belkin help me make their products to talk to each other. Naturally, extended holdtimes (average wait 20 minutes) included torturous recordings (if they value my call so much, why don't they answer it?) which ended in a voice with a dreaded Indian accent which cut me off twice, screwed up my machines until finally I was airlifted to Level 3 which sounded to be somewhere in Texas.

The morning's torture resulted in revelation of a valuable trade secret, though. You know how customer service often has several numbers? Always go with the 800 one. The 866 and 877s are more likely to land you far, far from home where tech "experts" are more familiar with ancient episodes of Friends (used in trainings) than they are with the inner workings of your recalcitrant product.

kindle dwindles

Three weeks ago I was in love with my Kindle, all smug that I'd copped one before later adapters slid to the bottom of a loooooong waiting list. But this newest object of my obsession is, alas, proving fickle. At first its screen ghosted so that the page I'd just "turned" wouldn't make way for the next, and words I'd just read bled through words that I hadn't. Still, I could make them out. Until this morning. The top third of the "page" simply disappeared, disintigrating in a way reminiscent of dying Etch-a-Sketch screens. (Anybody remember?)

I logged onto Amazon to look up their CS number, meaning to call and give them a piece of my mind. The bloody thing's not a month old and cost $400! If it died on me now, I'd have spent $100 per book! To my further annoyance, Amazon's CS number wasn't listed. Instead, a bolded copy line urged me to key in my number and "a dedicated Kindle representative will call you. Right now. Really." Uh huh. Naturally as soon as I keyed in my last number, the phone rang so Kindle--if they did actually call-- wouldn't be able to get through. But the call was from Kindle! A pleasant (English-his-first-language speaking) man asked what was wrong and walked me through a reset and when that didn't fix things, promised to send me a new one. No questions asked. To my surprise, he told me I can keep the old one so I can download books from one to the other, then send it back in packaging they'll be providing. He apologized that the shipment might take up to 5 days. (I hope not appropriating the machine meant for a friend who's been awaiting a delivery from Amazon for weeks.)

I hung up, giddy with wonder and gratitude and good will towards a company for which moments before, I'd been seething with hatred. Good call, Amazon. Now, let's see if you can deliver.

maybe we shouldn't be outsourcing our customer service to india

Irani Cafe, Hyderabad, India










via DKR via coming anarchy via triptouch

help yourself, it's 2008

Like Daily Biz, I've been mulling over Toad's trend predictions and came up with one to add to his list:

#7- Return of Service to Customer Service

I was grocery shopping the other day and the clerk at the register discontinued her (loud) conversation with the clerk in the next aisle, made eye contact with me and asked how I was--for which I felt inordinately grateful.

Since coming of age in an era when waiters did curb-service and elevator ladies in white gloves opened gates in dept. stores, I've downsized my expectations again and again until now I anticipate almost no service from service workers. (The nice clerk's bagger was busy deciding what to order for lunch, so naturally I bagged the groceries myself.)

Perhaps service workers get away with almost anything these days because they are an endangered species. It used to be pumping your own gas would save you a buck and you could make the choice to pump it yourself or not depending on how energetic (or strapped) you were feeling. Now, self-service is usually the only option, and even when full-service is offered, it's inexplicably the same price, unless you count not having to tip. (Exception: it's illegal to pump your own gas in New Jersey and Oregon--not sure what this says about lawmakers' view of constituents there.)

Once gas pumping went manual, banks began doing away with tellers. ATMs weren't popular at first--people were scared machines might issue wrong amounts of money, or they'd be robbed by passersby who'd push them aside on the sidewalk and grab the cash being excreted. A friend in the business worked on a bank in the 80s that decided their strategic point of difference would be no ATM's. Headline: Would you rather deal with a human or a machine? Needless to say, the bank went out of business. But now might be prime time for it to make a resurgence: ever try to get a cashier's check or deposit a big payout at one of those ATM-only branches?

I bet I'm not the only consumer weary of superstores making me check out my own stuff or airlines refusing to let me talk to an attendant before dealing first with a kiosk. I predict that consumers will begin to fight back, insist on service that's been lacking of late, even if they have pay a bit more for it. And, in a culture where social status is inexorably linked to monetary value, customer service might transform into a noble profession.

CS professionals might take a lesson from ad grunts who have been servicing customers with a smile for years. Another revision? Want that with fries?