Darrel 27 Jul 05

Isn’t it sad that the exceptional user experiences are so rare these days that they stand out?

The opposite of this is a recent attempt at buying some music. Heard a song by a local band and wanted to go buy it. Went to iTunes. Not there. Went to their site. CLICK HERE TO BUY. Takes me to amazon’s home page. Nothing on Amazon. Email them. No response. Post in their forum. No response.

I HAVE MONEY PLEASE TAKE IT!

On the plus side, ordered a product from Woot last week. It arrived broken. Sent an email asking them what to do. They sent a short reply: Here’s a tracking order for a new one.

I was confused. They’re sending me a new one? How do I return the old one? Do I need an RMA? What about shipping?

Well it turns out, they took my word that mine arrived broken and they simply immediately sent me a new one no strings attached. Nice!

Jake 27 Jul 05

Now that’s service my friend!

Davey 27 Jul 05

You wouldn’t think so, to look at their site…

Art Wells 27 Jul 05

Shrewd business move. I just bookmarked their site (and I’m shopping for memory). I don’t know them or you, but this is enough to get me as a cutomer.

Darrel, I was shopping for a router a couple of months ago, and broke down to the same all caps statement. I just needed someone, anyone, to look at the box and tell me the hardware revision number before I purchased it. After five emails, I gave up and bought something else entirely.

Chris 27 Jul 05

great service or great promotion?

They do something that costs them nothing but I bet you will use them from now on and since you posted it on a popular blog they get some good (public) feedback…

or maybe there just nice people?

Tommy 27 Jul 05

It is sad, but anything close to proactive customer service is surprising in today’s world. I am going back and forth w/ a toner company and they just don’t get it. I ordered like $550 worth of toner for my color laser printer. The cyan doesn’t work. They’re giving me a hard time like I am trying to scam them.

Then take Jason and 37Signals. I’ve asked him for help (they were my user error with user names) and he has taken care of them in a matter of seconds. Or Coudal (found Jason and Jim at the same time), where I ordered 400 jewel cases and messed up a few inserts (not a graphic person), he just send me more, free of charge.

I work for an ASP, our average sales is $3,750/year and so pay as much as $25,000. We have a 93.7% annual renewal rate. Why? The three ladies we have in customer support are amazing. At times I think we have “Raving Fans” more because of them then our product.

greta 27 Jul 05

I’m a bit creeped out by the “we traced this email from your website” bit. Perhaps I’m being paranoid, but I didn’t know it was possible to find an email through ordering. And how do they know it’s “me” @thatdomain.com?

Phil Boardman 27 Jul 05

Well, being a ‘bad email address’, it was probably just mis-typed rather than completely incorrect. I imagine they’d see an address with an extra letter, or without two ‘i’s or whatever?

It’s nice that they tried though, as long as the postal address is correct.

Robert 27 Jul 05

I want to thank 37signals for their kind comments and also the people providing their feedback here.

One clarification - we worked out the email address by simply looking at the information on the order, and then searched for and found this website… then we simply emailed the contact email addresses. Nothing mysterious!

Chris 28 Jul 05

It’s really peculiar how awful some companies are when it comes to service. We ordered something from a company in the UK which was sent by a courier to us. The courier noticed that the order was going to the wrong address when compared to its postcode. They tried to ring us once, failed to contact us and gave up. We then had to spend time tracing the order when it didn’t arrive.