Yesterday when everyone was oohing and aahing about Dave Sifry’s Moveable Type hack to show related stories using the Google API, I thought “that’s nice … hmmm … it shouldn’t be hard to do that in Radio. I’ll try to knock that up at the weekend.”
Jake’s beaten me to it.
Now to retitle all the posts that don’t bring back good results! And read all the interesting relating articles that I haven’t seen before!
A wonderful, but horrific, tale of customer service escalation from Dell [make sure to read it, blog-style, from the bottom up]. A customer had been waiting for a part for a year! CS rep, who resolved the issue in 10 minutes, escalated a complaint straight to Michael Dell, as per the customer’s wishes. Michael Dell starts probing what happened from the top, and the chain moves down from VP CS, to assistant, to a Senior Resolution Specialist, to an e-Services Customer Care, to (presumably) supervisor, who balls the CS rep out for daring to escalate directly to the top rather than going through the normal process. Even though the normal process had completely failed and the customer had had to buy a new laptop almost a year ago just to be able to do their job!
I’ve never understood this concept that senior executives don’t have time to listen to customer complaints. In many ways it’s the best way to get a handle on how the business is really doing. Every complaint that comes in to your company is a sign that something that you thought was working actually isn’t. Unfortunately most businesses don’t take their complaints and actively ask “What do we have to do to make sure this doesn’t happen again”. And I’m coming more and more to believe that this simple question is the single most important differentiator between a good company and a bad one.
[via Mike Daisey]
