Joel Spolsky recently had a problem with Cingular’s customer care.
This reminded me of my own experience with Palm’s customer care and on how this contrasts to the customer care of Refill24, a small firm where I purchase ink for my printer. Palm’s customer care blunders covered pages and pages of this blog; nobody seems to quite know what they are saying there(e.g.
the m505 has the brightest display of the whole series
).
Compare this to my Refill24 dealer, Mr Urban. I once had a problem with a HP cartridge going bonkers, and took it to him for analysis. I needed to print out a letter badly in the evening, and thus was a bit stressed-to my delight, he gave me a half-full cartrigde and told me to fetch my old one two days later. Two days later, we found out that the cartridge I gave him was broken, so he replaced it for me on his own costs…if that isnt customer service.
The question is this: why can a tiny, puny(compared to Palm) ink store offer great customer care while huge, top 500 american company can’t. What do you think? Do you agree with Joel?
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for the record, palm is hardly a huge company… in fact, it is truely miniscule compared to the major electronics companies like sony and dell.
You do have a point, though. Palm’s customer support is terrible… as is the customer support of virtually every other even quasi-major company save only a few. Perhaps the best example of a huge company somehow having amazing customer support is Lenovo. It is a chinese company with tech support based in the USA. (if anything is reverse-outsourcing, that is) What’s more, their tech people actually know what they are talking about.
Hi Someguy,
but they for sure are bigger than Urban’s Refill 24 ink store, deep in the arab “ghetto” of vienna…
About Palms customer care..yeah, terrible. May in fact even make ot to the Rants carnival one day…
Anyways, another company that is said to have great support(at least in germany) is Dell…
Best regards
Tam Hanna