- Right-on Customer Service. One day, the wireless receiver of my mouse got overheated (surreal, i know) and would no longer work. I called Microsoft (were you surprised it is MS?) to report the incident and no questions asked, they told me they will ship a new version with nary the burning hazard feature and it will arrive brand new in the color of my liking. Call wrapped up in 5 minutes. Amazing, yes? Wait - here's more! My work laptop hinted to crash lately and just yesterday it intermittently booted up, barely breathing. I reported this to our customer service and they verified that it was 3.5 computer years old already which basically means 90 years old in human years. I was about to cry because my laptop is the cornerstone of my staying productive (or the look of being productive) and I badly need to salvage my data. Guess what our customer service did? Here is a picture of my new laptop 15 feet from my doorstep, less than 24 hours after I called them up. They sent me a new one - overnight shipping! Hallelujah! Isn't it amazing?
I have observed that this whole concept of quality in customer service seems to be bounded by a good infrastructure - excellent and reliable postal services, sufficient supply of products and good trust with the customer - a naive kind of trust that customers would not abuse the suppliers, because the moment significant number of people do, the whole thing crumbles. Companies invest on customer service because their business, in this information age, rely heavily on word of mouth, and as what Eric Schmidt (ex-CEO of Google) said (and I paraphrase), the moment we breach the trust of our users, we cease to be reliable, and people would no longer trust our brand.
And this kind of simple, all-in, fast and responsive customer service is what I like about the culture here in US. Would it work in my home country? Yes, of course, we could even be better because we generally are built for service. But it requires a culture change and more.







