Customer Service

There have been two instances of excellent customer service that I’ve experienced recently. The service offered in both instances was so good, that I decided to blog about them.

The first experience took place just before WWDC this year. Usually after a year of hammering on a laptop battery, I pick up a fresh battery before the conference, simply because it’s important that the laptop works all day while taking notes in the sessions. Usually I replace the battery with an Apple standard battery, but this year I decided to give a third party a shot. FastMac has a battery for the MacBook Pro that claims it will last longer than the Apple one, and it’s about $20-30 cheaper too. I ordered it and waited patiently for it to arrive.

After hearing nothing for about a week (and WWDC getting dangerously close), I decided to give them a call. The person I talked to was apologetic, stating that they ran out of stock just before my order was placed. Bummer. Fortunately, FastMac did have new Apple batteries in stock, and not only did they offer to switch my order, they added rush shipping to make sure it would arrive before the conference, and knocked the price down to $10 less than they were charging for their own battery. The unit arrived with a day or two to spare, and overall it was a great example of a company going the extra mile.

The second experience happened just a few days ago. I’m installing a new network here at the office, and part of that new network was a Cisco router. As usual, I ordered the new equipment from NewEgg. It arrived, and seemed to work okay out of the box, but for some reason I was unable to connect to the device using the ASDM or over the web configuration interface. I called up Cisco, and the tech I spoke with there spent an hour and a half on the phone with me trying to troubleshoot the issue. The nice thing was their use of WebEx to help troubleshoot, so they could share my Desktop here and work with the router themselves directly. In the end, it was determined that the router I received had a corrupted flash chip, because we were unable to write any new data to the flash disk.

I went through NewEgg’s online exchange interface, and it was looking like I needed to pay to ship the damaged router back to them (shipping of the replacement device was free). I was a bit put off by this. While I agree it wasn’t NewEgg’s fault I received a bum router, I also shouldn’t pay extra for something that wasn’t my fault either. When calling up NewEgg to ask an unrelated question, the representative I was speaking to noticed that I was charged shipping to return the damaged device. Not only did he refund the return shipping amount, but he also put through an order for the new device to ship before they received the damaged one. To top it all off, he upgraded the shipping on the replacement to next-day air for free.

In this last situation, both Cisco and NewEgg get major props for great service. The new router arrived and it’s worked perfectly from the get-go.