Ah yes, here’s a link i forgot to post along with the Spolsky customer service article yesterday. Saska visited the Nintendo HQ in Redmond to have the optical drive of her Wii fixed. Here’s the story about their customer service gone shockingly right.

Related to that, of course it is easy to remember both exceptionally good and exceptionally clumsy customer service. At a restaurant we visited with my ex-girlfriend (now wife), she wondered why the potatos with cheese were so dry and, well, un-cheesy. The girl at the counter went like Well sometimes we get double the cheese and sometimes we forget to throw it in… Needless to say, we didn’t return (and we had eaten there a few times before). Or when i called some company to speak with a given department, and the girl at the phone exchange managed to miss a button on the phone and i could hear her talk with her colleague that Yeah it was some geezer. She was a tad surprised when she took the horn and was told by me that the geezer hadn’t been connected yet.

On the other hand it doesn’t take much to do it right, even when you make a mistake. Leave out the cheese? Remember the mantra I’m sorry, it was my fault (even when it wasn’t) and offer a dessert –or at least a coffee– on the house.  And do not, under any circumstance put text in a mail, a CRM system or your code that you don’t want your customers to see, because one surprising day, they just might.