Some recent interactions with businesses have shown me that there are still practitioners of good customer service out there.

Telephone Problems

We are having issues with the phone lines in our house. Not really issues, it is more like our phone lines are possessed. Having some knowledge of the phone companies policies, I know that if you plug a phone in to the NID (the little box that your phone service runs through, typically on the side of your house) and it works, the phone company will charge you dearly to fix the problem. Upon determining that the issue is in the internal wiring we called Verizon to check on their services. The CSR was polite, told us about their rates (somewhere in the vicinity of $1.4 million to diagnose our problem, and another $32.15 to fix it — I kid, but only slightly), and then quite unsolicited mentioned to my wife that pretty much any independent contractor could do the work at a much more reasonable rate. That is not the customer service of which I speak (that is still to come).

Then I started calling independents listed in the phonebook (since no local contractor either have a website or can do SEO good enough to beat out the lead gen sites or the scrapers). After leaving about 6 messages I finally got a callback. Nice gentleman. Questioned me about the problem, gave me a couple hints, and then told me that his business was not in to residential phone line repairs, rather they were typically in to new builds. Then unsolicited, he mentions that there are a few companies that do offer this service, and proceeds to give me insight as to which he would go with and why, while mentioning the quirks about them. It was a very positive conversation… one which ended with him saying that if the companies he referred were not able to meet my needs that I should call him back for more options.

This guy had no obligation to be this pro-active. As a matter of fact, he was one of only 2 people to call me back out of the 7 or so that I ended up leaving messages at.

Tweet This Post!