Don’t thank me
I broke my wife’s netbook a while ago. I was being my usual super-efficient self and decided to help her out by updating the computer bios.
For those of you who don’t know what the bios is, it stands for basic input/output system. It’s the first code that activates during boot-up and before Windows starts…. anyway my update failed making her netbook little better than a large paperweight. I checked for fixes online, but nothing I tried worked.
So rather than throwing it away, I thought it was worth trying a major national computer repair company who are based in one of the major electrical retailers superstores.
They were unable to mend it, but recovered the data. Their technician was around 19 years old, incredibly knowledgeable, and we chatted over the two hours while he took the netbook apart, rescued the data and wiped the hard drive clean. It cost me £30.
When I got home let my wife know I had got her photos, music and word documents back. I told her how helpful the technician had been. ’I’m going to contact the company and tel them how impressed I was with the service’ I told her. I’ve often said I would acknowledge good service, but usually forget.
So I went to their website to find an email address… I could phone to book a repair, ask for technical support, and finally to complain… so I will be phoning their complaints department to say thank you for good work.
I phoned soon after 9am and was greeted with the message ‘We’re very sorry but we are experiencing unusually high levels of calls at the moment, however your call will be answered in 5 minutes’. There are companies I have phoned who always appear to be ‘experiencing unusually high levels of calls’, or perhaps they just don’t have enough call centre staff. Maybe the complaints department delay answering in the hope you will get tired of waiting.
I actually waited well over 6 minutes. The customer service guy had no idea how to deal with a thank you, and I waited another few minutes while he went off to find out what to do. He took a few details and said he’d pass it on… my call lasted 12 minutes altogether.
Our online reviews pages give our customers the chance to comment, critisice and praise, which they do in equal measure. There is nothing like receiving praise for a job well-done, but perhaps it should be easier to say thank you.
I agree with you that we don’t say thank you nearly often enough when we have received good service. I work in a library, and a customer commented the other day that our library was, ‘one of the nicest she had ever been in’, and we were stunned into silence! After all the recent changes and bad news that has been coming through, it was lovely to receive comments that we are still being friendly and helpful in tough times. More people should appreciate good service, because it really made my day!
Unfortunately, positive feedback is rarely recorded. Only complaints are usually written so we seem to get a lot more of them than anything else. I have to spend a lot of time responding to mostly silly complaints with carefully chosen words, whereas all that a positive comment needs in return is a “thank you” and a smile…
There is a saying that is heard a lot among computer geeks: “BIOS upgrade: if you don’t need it, don’t do it”. I stand by it!
I hope you bought your wife an iPad for the trouble!..