The Extra Mile
I’ve spent the better part of the day going through my annual “virtual” spring cleaning. I was doing some maintenance on my home PC when I started receiving some weird errors I traced to a memory problem–as in the memory test was even freezing.
I have a two-year old Dell which is still under warranty for another year. I’ve always liked their service tag approach where I could look up my warranty info online. While I was there I just happened to see a Dell Chat window. I’ve had poor experiences with these things in the past but decided to give it a chance. Here is basically what happened:
I opened up the chat window and got connected to a tech in under a minute. After a brief intro to the problem we ran a few tests and found it to be one of my memory sticks. Just to be on the safe side he offered to overnight me two replacement sticks. He was very cordial and I never got a hint that he was copying and pasting from a script. After the session I received a copy of the conversation along with the tracking information.
Very slick.
This incremental investment by Dell to provide me this experience has given me a huge boost in confidence about its products. This is a perfect example of a company leveraging technology to improve interactions rather than as a way to cut contact and minimize cost.
This dilemma presents itself time and time again as SEs. Do you give the customer your cell number? Do you even leave your cell number on your office voicemail message? Do you give out your instant messaging name? Do you try to summarize a response in an email or do you pick up the phone? Do you give the customer the support escalation desk number or do you make the call for them?
Each situation is different, but here my point: My experience with Dell was only fantastic because I am so use to others’ mediocrity at best and complete incompetence at the worst. Every time you go do just a little bit better by your customer you are helping create that experience that customers crave.
When you do this consistently you are creating a value-add for your company that is extremely hard for a competitor to overcome with product features. To me, spending that little extra time to go the extra mile is time very, very well spent.
Happy holidays everyone!
Darrin
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