Customer Service

Well I'm sure if I asked pretty much anyone it wouldn't take long before I get some sort of customer service horror story, it seems that we've all come across that completely useless person who's only purpose seems to be to make life harder than it needs to be.

Well over the last week I've had one of the best examples of customer service I've experienced in ages and sadly I don't feel that I can say which company it was or the exact product that I had a problem with just in case someone might decide to take advantage of that companies generosity.

The company in question is a UK based DVD distributor who seems to have a less than optimal reputation when it comes to quality control, over the last year or so they have been re-releasing a classic 60's television series, one of the boxsets had a production error on all of the discs in the sets that meant the audio was mastered at the wrong pitch.

I'd bought the faulty boxset when I was first released but hadn't watched any of the DVDs and sure enough my boxset contained discs from the original production run featuring the flawed audio track.

The company in question has been happy to replace faulty DVDs with the corrected ones if customers returned the faulty DVDs to them which I was happy to do - well at least until I found out how much Australia Post wanted to charge me to airmail the faulty DVDs back to the UK.

I contacted the company in question and asked if I could just be sent the DVDs, I was happy to provide proof of purchase or pay a reasonable sum for the discs if this was a problem, while all this was being sorted out my computer died and along with it my proof of purchase.

Using my wife's laptop I contacted them again and said I no longer had access to my proof of purchase details and I would be happy to buy the replacement DVDs from them, they wrote back to me and said if I could send me a digital photo of the boxset they would send me the DVDs so I did as they asked but never heard any more from them but today a mere five working days later I received a package in the mail containing all of the replacement DVDs.

The truth is that I probably could have gotten a photo of the boxset online if I tried so in the name of customer service they ignored their usual return policy and didn't ask me to return the faulty DVDs, what they accepted as proof of purchase was almost nonexistent, passed up an opportunity to get me to pay for another set of DVDs and finally sent the replacement DVD priority air mail so that I received them on the other side of the world in less than a week - I don't know about you but I think that is pretty damn good customer service.