Recently I had two varied experiences as a customer.
Through my company I am a subscriber of Safari books. They offer tokens for downloading ebooks. These expire after some time and then you get a new set. I ended up waiting till the last day to use my tokens but somehow the tokens were already lost. I got in touch with their customer support and explained the issue. Later I got the following email from them-
As explained by my colleague S*, tokens are hardcoded with your company’s annual contract date and are not reimbursable. Once the new contract begins, a new batch of subscription tokens are allocated and those from previous terms do not roll over.
In the case of corporate level token batches, you have over 360 days to use the batch and we wouldn’t want you to scramble in the last few moments to use them all. For this reason, we have a “(60 Tokens (0 Expire Soon)” in the My Dashboard area of your account immediately following login; we double this up with an opt-in template in hopes that folks will see one or both. The email clearly states the tokens will be unusable on the final day of expiration: “As of 12/6/2014, you have 60 token(s) that you can use before the expiration date of 12/21/2014 (NOTE: They expire the day-of and will not be usable on this date).”
To add to this, there is a way to download books without the use of tokens at all. You actually have unlimited reading/access online and you may also cache up to three titles at a time for offline use by way of our STG (“Safari To Go”) apps, and every book we offer can be cached offline.
Turns out that they had the time in an email which I glossed over and was looking at their site which did not show the time.
So I was partly at fault but the response I got from them was all corporate talk. Completely as per protocol but not that good as a customer. To their credit they did give me some free tokens later but still ended up feeling dissatisfied.
I occasionally buy products at amazon. I recently wanted to return a small item that was less than $10 in value. So I was expecting the usual return label and then trip to the post office to drop the package and so on. But to my surprise, after submitting the form to return the product, there was no return needed. Just keep the product and the money was refunded immediately.
I do not know what the underlying condition was to trigger this. Low cost vs other purchases. Or cost to restock the product. But in any case it was a much pleasant experience.
Small things like this really matter. Customers who are treated well are more likely to return. It is important to allow your support staff to show empathy towards the customers. Problems will happen. But customers will relate much better to a human response.