Customer Service: I Am Ever Reminded of How Important It Is

I don’t really want to complain or bash anyone here, but I recently had a pretty bad customer service experience that left me scratching my head.

It involved Verizon, my wireless provider. Before I go on, I want to stress that aside from this incident, they have been very good, and I think of them as the best provider—bar none. Their network is the best, they have worked to get the best phones, and are appropriately priced for the quality they maintain.

However, this experience was different, not even because someone was rude or messed up, but because it just didn’t make sense. Here is the situation: I have an old school flip phone because my newer one broke and I switched over knowing that my upgrade was on its way. (Stoked for the Droid Incredible) Anyway, we called up Verizon asking if it was possible for me to get my upgrade a few months earlier so that I could have a better phone sooner.

What puzzled me was that they said no. Here is the thing, they have a hard-line rule on the upgrade time periods, but when you sit down and think about it, it lost them some of my dollars. I currently have a basic voice plan because my phone doesn’t really browse the internet. What this means is that an upgrade for me would mean having to switch to a more expensive data plan, something I knew and fully expected.

What I tried to explain is that it would actually be in their best interest to give me the newer phone now and upgrade my plan to the data one, meaning that make more money off me every month that much sooner. It makes perfect sense and would have made me extremely happy. You can’t ask for a better win-win situation in business, an opportunity for me to get what I want and a chance for them to make about three times as much money a month immediately.

It just served as a reminder to examine situations with common sense and with the customer as the number one priority. I love Verizon, I talk about them to my friends all the time, even explaining why they are better on technological level, but this still got to me enough to want to write about it.

Everyone knows you have to keep you customers happy, sometimes all that takes is a little common sense and attention to detail.