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On nearly a daily basis, I find myself asking the question, “What has happened to customer service these days?” Perhaps part of the problem is that I’ve let the corporate-speak term “customer service” enter into my vocabulary. How about just treating me fairly? Then you won’t have to invent an entire department filled with employees with fictitious titles, absolutely no authority to make decisions, and call them “customer service representatives.” Frankly, I don’t feel well represented.

Case in point: a certain telephone company runs ads saying that you should switch to their DSL-based high speed internet service because they’ll give you the same speed as the cable company, but at a much lower price. Great. Sign me up. Which I did, 7 weeks ago. After three different sets of technicians came out to try to get it right, the best they could do was a speed roughly 8 times slower than what I was already getting with cable. Fine, I’ll stick with what was already working well, so I call the phone company to cancel. “I don’t have the authority to cancel your account,” says CSR #1, “but I’ll have someone who can call you tomorrow.” Translation: when it’s convenient for us. In all it took me five different phone calls and a trip to one of their stores to finally get the account canceled. I’d estimate I spent 15 hours getting that done. What does that tell you about how well this customer was represented?

Counterpoint. I’ve got a development team completely immersed in Ruby on Rails. One of the bibles of Rails development is Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson, so I bought a handful of copies for the team. While looking something up in one of the copies last night, I noticed my page numbering went from 56 directly to 89, so I sent a note to the publisher, The Pragmatic Bookshelf. Not even an hour later, I got an e-mail from Ellie Callahan at The Pragmatic Bookshelf, asking for my address so that they could express ship a new copy to me, no questions asked. There was no, “I don’t have the authority to…” or “…someone will call you tomorrow.” She simply apologized for the printing error and took take of the problem. They now a customer for life.

It’s something simple we impress upon the people here at Barefoot all the time. Do the right thing. Do the best work possible. Treat our clients and co-workers fairly.

One of the two companies mentioned above will not only continue to get my business, but they will get my support and recommendation as well. The other will not. I’ve quite literally put my money where my mouth is by linking to those I recommend.