Max and Kelly and me: Two customer-service stories

I spent the best part of this afternoon engaged in two rather different customer-service experiences, both involving the internet.

The first involved money – trying to get my hands on a simple electronic copy of a Bell Canada phonebill that had been posted in my epost account.

The second involved happiness – more precisely, ordering tickets to an interesting breakfast session to hear Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of the book Delivering Happiness.

The Bell bill saga took me into an online chat with a fellow named Max. Based on the seeming lifelessness of the replies, it appeared the chat service was a very sophisticated automated response system, but in fact Max was a real fellow based in India (he wasn't permitted to tell me his age). I found it rather frustrating trying to explain to Max, keystroke by keystroke, about my desire to put my (backup) dial-up internet service and two landlines into the same MyBell.ca account with a single password. Shortly into the process, I asked Max if we could stop 'chatting' and actually speak in person, as that would be a lot easier for me, but alas, he wasn't permitted to do that. In the end though, we got the account updating done. Sadly, my prejudices about the inflexibility and non-customer-centredness of Bell were confirmed.

Contrast that with the experience that I had with a gal named Kelly (I'm pretty sure that was her name) from the customer care team at Globe Recognition.

Although they didn't get back to me until I hounded them, Kelly (a live voice on the phone!!) was very keen to help, and managed to dream up and execute some behind-the-scenes administrative magic that updated the antiquated email address in my account profile so that I could login and order my breakfast session ticket.

It strikes me as more than ironic that the ultimate intent of this second exercise was to hear about business of delivering happiness from the representative of a company whose slogan is 'Powered by Service'!