New faith in customer service

Customer service is one of those things that can really make or break my relationship with a company. Good customer service keeps me coming back, bad customer service keeps me from coming back. It's all about the attitude of both the company and its employees: if the company has a good system and views the customer service section of its budget as an investment instead of a required expense, it's likely to be a pleasant experience overall. If the employee views his or her job as being to serve the customer instead of a source of a paycheck, it's going to be a good experience.

This is brought on by a customer service encounter I had today, related to the apparent death of my cell phone.

The first involves Radio Shack, which is where I bought the phone in the first place. I tried to stop over Friday afternoon and found a sign on the door that they were closed in order to move to a new location. Figures, the one time in my life where I really HAVE to go to Radio Shack (at 3:30 on a Friday afternoon, no less) is the one day of the store's lifetime that it's moving. The sign said they should be open Saturday in the new location (another strip in the same town), so I drive over on Saturday. There's a sign on the new store saying they won't be open until Monday; argh. There are people in the store unpacking boxes, so I knock on the door to ask if there's another Unicel dealer in town. I wasn't trying to get them to help me, just to send me somewhere that could help me.

Here's the good customer service part: the response was "No, there's not another store in town. What's wrong with your phone?" When I explained the problem (I assume it was to the manager), he called one of his other employees (the one who knows cell phones) over and said "See what you can do for this gentleman." Aside from the fact that I am hardly a gentleman, and even though the store was closed, they did the best they could, which included calling the old store to find out where the SIM cards were, digging through a box to find a different SIM card to try, and determining that the problem was with the phone and not the SIM card. They said "Unfortunately we can't send it out now; our computers aren't up yet so we can't put in a service request and since we're not open FedEx won't be by until probably Tuesday." With the store a mess and not even open, they did what they could. I was happy; I'll go back to Radio Shack in the future because of it.

Still no working phone, but a renewed faith in the customer service of a national chain.