You just got mis-served

A book I read had a side story of one of the characters taking customer service into her own hands. Literally. When the technician finally arrived to repair her washing machine, she kidnapped him and would not let him go till the matter was resolved to her satisfaction.

This was one feisty customer, and of course, it was fiction. Let’s look at some incidents in the real world which had customers do a double-take before they could do anything else.

Aparna Balasubramaniam, a Panaji-based freelance photographer, was surprised to hear the customer service executive address her as “Sir”. “Somewhere down the line – it was a lengthy conversation – it began to bother me and I told him, you know I’m a woman, why are you calling me Sir? And he said, ‘Yes, Sir, I will call you Madam’, and continued to call me Sir till the end of the conversation,” she says.

This was not so bad. When the convection portion of her two-in-one microwave oven failed to pre-heat properly, she ferried it to the repair centre on the advice of the customer service executive she had called.

She was given a job card and asked to come back after a couple of days. When she went to pick it up, she checked it and found out it had not been repaired. The technicians there insisted they had replaced the faulty parts. To her dismay, she discovered that they had replaced the perfectly good parts in the microwave part of the oven. After four days, she found out it was still pre-heating only up to 180 degrees and not 220. And the technician asked her why she needed to heat up to 220, could she not make do with lower temperatures.

Some years ago, in what turned out to be a particularly bad month, P. Jyothi had to make do without her washing machine, her fridge and her microwave, all of the same brand, and all of which had been taken away for repairs. Pulling some strings helped after she failed to get her appliances back even after six weeks.

A pair of young technicians brought back the appliances and reinstalled them, gave her a card which said ‘Sorry’ (it was an empty card, she could have reused it) and then asked her to rate their service on an official form.

She was stumped, but finally sent them away gently, saying she would skip that step this time as the circumstances had been extraordinary.

Then there was the case of the customer service executive who came to repair my laptop computer, and pointed to the ‘Excellent’ option wordlessly when I came to the question on quality of service received. I rated him ‘Good’ and added a note in appreciation about how he had been punctual and sent him on his way. I wonder if I should have been more indulgent.

Vitamin C is a weekly dose of consumer empowerment.

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