When I came home this last time, I had an email from Zappos asking about the shoes, since they hadn’t received them. I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could.

Read on to find out what Zappos did next.

I’ll hopefully be able to give some of these tips for dealing with your consumer issue:

• Have a pen and paper ready for the call.
• Note the time when you dialed and they answered.
• Get the person’s name. Ask them to spell it out for you. This lets them know you are making a note of it. This alone can improve a call.
• Explain your issue.
• If asked to hold, say no, ask to not be and say you will wait but you will not hold.
• If they say they want to transfer you. Ask are you going to be talking to a more senior person. Ask what they can do. Ask will they be briefed on your issue.
• Ask for a ticket number or issue number before you are forwarded on. Most should be able to provide this.
• If you are getting nowhere, ask for a supervisor. If you are refused, insist on talking to someone more senior. If none are available insist on getting their email address instead.

If you get nothing from the call, then you may have to try something else. You may need to email a boss in the company. Many emails for large companies work by firstname.secondname@companyname.com, find out the name of the directors and email them all.

You can also send a registered letter to the directors of the company which should be provided on their website or with the Companie’s Registration Office.

The company might be in a regulated industry such as energy or telecoms. Contact the regulator for this industry.

Contact the National Consumer Agency

About 45 minutes later the DHL driver in his personal car arrived in my driveway, gave my dog a graham cracker (go figure) and delivered my package. He was very apologetic even though he had no control over a broken down truck. To be honest I thought he would be very upset that his boss made him come out on his way home and give me my package but he seemed very happy to be able to do it, it felt like it might of even been his idea.

A great way of doing customer service and also as a by-product 10s of 1000s of people read this story on the web after it made the front page of DIGG. If every customer was an evangelist after you made a little extra effort, then you’d be swamped with business.

http://fon.gs/sony-announcement/

So I rang the relevant support number which turned out to be MF Services in Cork. Drop in the camera I was told. Oh and leave us 79euro as well please and thank you. I suggested that seeing as this was a recall I shouldn’t have to part with cash as well as the camera and was told that it was normal practice.

So I rang Sony UK. If you live in the UK (And US) and have a camera covered by that recall Sony will give you a Freepost address and there’s no question of having to pay a deposit.

There we have it - the Irish consumer has to make their own arrangements to return the recalled product and pay a deposit to help keep the cash flow of the service agents.

Nice work Sony. And MF Services in Doughcloyne.

edit: The deposit turned out to be 79.45 ! What a strange amount. Even stranger was that their posted notices said that the deposit was only 50euro for camcorders….

The post was timed at 11.36am local time. At 4.39pm the same day, a Saturday (!), I received a message from Mark Hall at VodPod. He’d read my blog, noted the comments, explained in detail the situation with the video I’d tried loading, gave me a workaround, and even apologised for the “lame” error message.

Some companies are actively monitoring the net for their product names and company names and then responding to people in a constructive manner. While this could become resource intensive as your customer base builds, it can be great when starting out as it will iron out all the wrinkles so when you are big, you’ll get far less complaints, allowing you to provide fantastic support and customer care to those who do contact you. It’s a great selling point too to have customers evangelising that you come to them, they don’t have to chase you about problems.

received frequent calls from you regarding your billing or other general account information

At some point perhaps these large telcos will realise that if they have customers who have to call back a lot, that perhaps there is some issue with their systems and not with the customer. I’m sure they’ll use the pathetic mantra “nobody else seems to have a problem, so it’s your fault, not ours.” and attitude that while not explicitly stated is certainly applied by so many arrogant companies and their support staff. Luckily over here we have a regulator that is meant to stop this kind of crap.

instead of trying to control information that was made public, we should have simply corrected anything that was inaccurate. We didn’t do that, and now we’re paying for it.

It’s nice to see this better attitude from Dell, though they have a long way to go to fix everything. Still, they seem to be differentiating themselves from other companies by starting down the road of transparency. Kudos Dell.

I got a police report literally minutes after I was robbed and I called Ace travel insurance to find out how to proceed. They told me to download and print an online claim form and they gave me an address of where to send it in Scotland. So I DHL’d the stuff to Scotland and they delivered the stuff in 6 working days, I took a note of the proof of delivery. A couple of days later I called Ace and they gave me a UK number to call. I spent 18 minutes holding (calls aren’t cheap from South America so thank god for skype), I was then told that they hadn’t received my documentation. I tried to explain to the lady that the stuff was delivered by DHL and I offered to send her the copy of the proof of delivery, she offered to call me back but that wasn’t going to work because my phone was also stolen and I didn’t have a skype number she could call me back on, she scampered off again and about 10 minutes later she came back to say that they couldn’t find the docs and suggested I call back in a couple of days to see if they would turned up. Two days later I spoke to the same lady and she told me that the docs had turned up but they had sent them onto the claim handler for Ace europe who is OSG in Dublin. So 2 days later I got onto OSG to see if the docs had appeared and they hadn’t. 5 days later and 3 calls later the docs turned up.

2 weeks later I still hadn’t heard anything about a settlement so I called them yet again, but I couldn’t get my claim handler and the person who answered the phone seemed completely unwilling to give me any help at all, I asked her to pass a message onto my claim handler and to email me back. A few more days passed by and I still hadn’t heard anything by email, I called again and spoke to my claim handler who said the claim was settled but she seemed pretty unwilling to tell me how much the cheque was for. A couple of days later the cheque arrived at home and it was for a tiny amount (about 10% of the value of the stuff stolen). I called again on several occasions but my claim handler wasn’t available, I asked to speak to a supervisor and I was told none was available. I emailed my claim handler a few more times and a few days later eventually got a response which felt like “haha, you should have read your terms and conditions, this is all we’re giving you”

An atrocious customer service experience. Read all 25 pages of the T&C’s!!!!!! Or better still, stay away from Ace!