I have recently had some less than positive experiences with 'customer service', recently another way of 'adding insult to injury'. Letters go unanswered and staff are often poorly trained, unaware of their company's products or services and unable to answer even simple questions. And then there are the voice response systems, designed to make sure blood pressure quickly reaches critical levels before finally allowing us to escape from the maze, only to have the human ask us for the same information that we had already laboriously keyed in.
There are exceptions. I was recently reminded that good service can be simplicity itself. I regularly order from Dark City Coffee, a Toronto firm that custom roasts a wide variety of coffee to your taste and delivers to your door via courier (within the GTA). The process is straightforward: call a number and leave a message. New customers receive a return call so that the staff determine the customer's coffee preferences. Existing customers can just leave their order.
Consistency is an important part of good customer service. Although I usually order late in the day and live in a rural area at the northern limit of Dark City's delivery area, the package arrives like clockwork two days later. Only once was an order lost - a quick phone call solved the problem.
Dark City Coffee is a relatively small company and does not require sophisticated systems behind the scenes. However, even large companies could benefit from the morale of the story: the best service is simple, responsive, consistent and high quality.
