NVinNYC

Seven steps to remarkable customer service from Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software is really a great read. It’s particularly interesting for people with customer service experience but it’s pertinent to everyone since dealing with customer service can be such a hassle these days.

Some of these tactics are ones I used regularly working as a Genius. Number 6, ‘Practice puppetry’, was particularly helpful because I always had to remember customers were upset with Apple, not myself, even though they would address their complaints to me directly (“You make these iPods so break right after the warrantee expires!”).

Others are areas that I can see myself improving on if I ever worked a customer service related job again, like number 4, Take the blame’. Apple would do well to take note of several of the tips as well. Number 1, ‘Fix everything two ways’ particularly could use improvement on Apple’s part because it seems like even a technical guy like me has trouble getting through to them to tell them about a problem or bug in their software. I feel like Apple could also take heed of a tidbit number 3, ‘Make customers into fans’ too; it’s really important to reduce wait times to talk to someone about your problem. I can’t tell you how many time I started repair talks on a bitter note because someone was upset at having to wait 3 hours for a Genius Bar appointment or because they spent hours on the phone with Apple Care only to be referred to the Genius Bar to start the repair process over.

Some of these lessons obviously would be difficult to scale to large companies like Apple, any other large company for that matter, but it’s all the more important to consider them because of that. Joel is right, most customer service is so bad that we avoid it: I know that I want to complain to Wells Fargo about how they charged me debit card fees unjustly, but it’s not worth the money or frustration this would cause me to bother. It seems like the same is true at most ISPs, cable providers, cellphone companies, and computer manufacturers (and I include Apple in this category). I don’t know how this became an acceptable business practice (I have some partial theories) but it’s really inexcusable and it needs to be improved.

Now who wants to bust up some Starbucks?

(Via Swiss Miss though I seem to remember seeing this linked elsewhere before.)