Impressive customer service

I just received a call on my cell phone from T-mobile and was extremely impressed with their cus­tomer ser­vice. Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed that the level of ser­vice has degraded (mean­ing that my sig­nal is not as clear as it used to be). I’ve never com­plained about this to them but they called in to check how happy I was with the ser­vice. Once they iden­ti­fied them­selves and made sure that I was the per­son hold­ing the account, their first ques­tion was “how happy are you with the ser­vice?” I told them that I thought the qual­ity of ser­vice had degraded over the last few weeks (being a long-time mobile phone user, I’ve resolved myself to the fact that ser­vice degrades over time as more peo­ple join a par­tic­u­lar provider. As a result of that low level of expec­ta­tion, I had assumed that fil­ing a com­plaint would not accom­plish any­thing.) How­ever, the minute I men­tioned that fact to them, they started ask­ing more ques­tions: Where did this hap­pen? How often? Once they got all the details, the T-mobile rep­re­sen­ta­tive told me that they were cred­it­ing my account for twenty five dol­lars to make up for the trou­ble. I had not asked for any­thing. I had not even called to com­plain and there they are telling me that because they haven’t lived up to my expec­ta­tions, they are cred­it­ing me.

That, to me, is amaz­ing cus­tomer ser­vice. In a world where I, as a con­sumer, usu­ally find myself won­der­ing why com­pa­nies are not putting more empha­sis on ser­vic­ing their exist­ing cus­tomers, I am extremely impressed with the level of cus­tomer ser­vice I’ve received from T-mobile. As a result, I would highly rec­om­mend them to any­one who is in their cov­er­age area. I don’t usu­ally do so but con­sid­er­ing how much they’ve done, it’s the least I can do to repay them.

I would like to applaud this level of cus­tomer ser­vice and prompt other com­pa­nies (either in tech­nol­ogy or other fields) to take this as an exam­ple of how to do busi­ness. Cus­tomer ser­vice is very expen­sive but tak­ing care of your exist­ing cus­tomers is how you can reduce churn and ensure that your cus­tomers become your mar­keters. To me, T-mobile is a clued-in company.