Well, if the bad guys deserve some bad press then certainly the good guys deserve some good press, too. This Adventure in Customer Service is a good adventure. The tale of a company that’s clearly doing things right and that’s something we can all appreciate.
With some of the windfall from our October wedding, Maria and I brought a dish rack from simplehuman. This brand, which I haven’t really heard of before, seemed to be pretty prolific in many of the houseware chains that we visited. All of their products whether it was trash cans (which we also bought), storage units, kitchen tools or, in our case, dish racks, were priced fairly steeply but we figured that the mantra you get what you pay for might be true. So we bought a dish rack, an expensive one, and we were pretty satisfied with our purchase. At our house the job of doing the dishes is mine—Maria does the laundry—and this dish rack had everything I could’ve ever wanted. It was spacious, sturdy, fit dishes and cups of all sizes perfectly and even had a place to hang two extra glasses off the side and a slot designated for cutting boards or baking sheets. This dish rack was amazing.
But then it started to leak.
Occasionally, when I’d washed dishes some water would dribble out, from the side opposite to where it was supposed to drain. I was regularly wiping up water off the counter.
We were busy and so I let it go for a long while but eventually it began to leak pretty consistently and I decided to do something about it. And here’s an example of amazing customer service. I e-mailed the customer service address on the simplehuman website and tried to explain my problem. It was a bit difficult because my problem wasn’t so clear. The dish rack was leaking but it wasn’t so easy to explain from where, or how, without a picture or a video but I did my best. Only a few days later came my reply. I was told, unequivocally, that it sounded like there was a problem with my dish rack’s drip tray and a new one would be sent to me immediately. Not even a question or hesitation about it—I could’ve been making up the whole thing. But this is great customer service, and I was honestly surprised.
I was even more surprised when a giant box containing a new drip tray and tons of packing materials to keep it safe arrived via UPS two days later. Not only had simplehuman rectified my problem without so much as a questioning glance, they sent me the replacement part within a couple of days using a priority shipping company instead of the regular mail. And, they had packed it in an unnecessarily giant box so that it wouldn’t get damaged or broken during the ship. They’d covered all their bases.
This article series has been all about lessons, so what are the lessons here?
In the my previous two articles the lessons have been obvious: provide good customer service, admit and fix your mistakes, and you’ll see customers return and reputations repaired. The lesson I learned with my simplehuman experience is, ironically, simple as well. Good customer service counts. This company went out of its way to provide excellent service and, in the future, I’ll definitely buy their products. They didn’t even question the problem I was having with my dish rack. They shipped me a replacement/repair in a heartbeat. They impressed me and how important is that in customer service?
It’s simple: if you back an expensive product with good customer service then you’ll keep customers coming, people will be willing to buy at a higher cost if that product is backed by a good reputation. You treat your customers right and you gain more of a following, you gain a good reputation. You don’t, and you lose out in the end. It’s amazing when you think about the customer service I received after buying a car and the service I received after buying a dish rack—it’s clear who the winners and losers are, eh?
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