Rescue Your Company with Great Customer Service

Many online companies never have to deal with their customers directly. There might be an FAQs to answer those frequently asked questions or an email address where inquiries are answered… eventually.

Yet, customers are the lifeblood of every business and many a company has lost me because of poor customer service.

I’m always surprised when I get great customer service. That shows how immune I’ve grown to customer service that is subpar. When it’s really bad, I make a note never to go back to the business and I tell my friends. There is a statistic out there that says something to the effect that if your customer service is bad, people will on average tell 5 people. Please correct me if I’m wrong on the number.

Back in June, I wrote about RescueTime, the application that shows you where you spend your time. Upon returning from Panama, RescueTime stopped working completely and inexplicably. I tried to reboot, even reinstalled the program, but nothing. My time tracking was essentially over.

I emailed customer support, didn’t hear back. Waited a couple of days. Emailed again. No answer.

I figured I’d give them one more chance and would move on, cancel my subscription, find another application. Then, I got an apologetic email from the founder, Tony Wright, wondering why I hadn’t responded to him. He also apologized for the trouble, saying it was the first time anyone using RescueTime had the application stop monitoring time and suggested a couple of fixes.

Those didn’t work.

Tony suggested another fix, which also didn’t work. At this point, he starts cc’ing his development team and emails me, “Thanks for your willingness to help!  We’re all Mac guys here and RescueTime just hums along for us. So this is pretty troubling and we’d love to track it down!”

Joe at RescueTime steps in and asks me to send my configuration files (he even gives me two different ways to find those files on my Mac). Within 10 minutes, Joe emails back with the fix, which easily solves the problem. Joe thanks me because helping me will help future customers.

A couple of lessons: First, when you’re waiting for an email response, check your spam folder. Things do end up there, unfortunately. Second, if you’re dealing with a customer problem, instead of considering it a problem, why not turn it into a challenge to solve. It is likely others will have the same problem. Third, when you’re addressing the problem, be cheerful and even thankful. Again, others might have the same problem and solving once means you might not have to solve it again. Finally, remember that people expect bad service and love to complain about the bad service they receive. It’s much rarer to have someone praise you for the way you treat your customers.

Thanks again Tony, Joe and the great team at RescueTime.com.