I have to tell you an interesting story that occurred over the holidays. I bought a personal computer last year and to be on the safe side, I decided to sign up for one those 24-hour tech support services. Since I’m a very active nighttime computer user, being able to call for help at 2:00am is important for me.
Sure enough, one late night over the holidays my computer went on the blink. I don’t know which specific key, or combination of keys, I accidentally pressed that made the computer freeze up, but I exclaimed, “Dear God, why me?” Naturally, I went into panic mode and started looking for that 24-hour tech support service number. “Where did I write it down? Why can’t I find something when I need it”? Finally locating it in a place where I normally don’t file things, with a shaking hand I called the number and prayed that I would get through a complicated maze of questions until I could speak to a human being.
To my astonishment, the phone was picked up within two rings and the man’s voice on the other end said very calmly, “Good evening, my name is Patrick and I’m here to help you.” Wow! My immediate thought was that I must be in heaven. This cannot be! I mean, it’s unheard of in this day and age to actually get in touch with someone with such speed and politeness, let alone in the wee hours of an early morning. “No, something must be wrong here? I asked myself.
Getting my composure, I responded to Patrick with a thirty second rushed account of what happened to my computer and made sure he had my cell number in the event of a disconnection. Patrick repeated my number from his display and reassured me that he would try his best to resolve my frozen computer issue.
Now that I was calm and appeared to be in the comforting hands of a young computer technical genius, I entrusted my life to his.
After shutting the computer down and rebooting it with a “special” kind of key combination, Patrick went to work getting into the guts of the computer system via a screen share mode. Flipping around, checking and unchecking certain boxes, cleaning out this and that, and reviewing the spam filter and other details, it appeared that whatever I did to disrupt the “peaceful and harmonious” inner hardware operation, was no longer a problem.
Now that I was emotionally back on planet Earth and my computer was working as usual, I asked Patrick how many years he has been working on computers. He replied that he’s been working on them for about 23 years. I said, “You sound very young. May I ask, How old are you?” He responded by saying he was 25 and that he started on his Mac computer from the age of two!
Well, without question, the younger generation, and I mean the real younger generation, are basically born with a computer at their finger tips.
But the real point of this scenario is how refreshing it is when a company provides very personalized customer service in this day and age of endless switchboards, mazes, chat boxes, and complicated and impersonal interactions to solve a customer’s urgent problem.
Wishing all of you a wonderful customer service year ahead!
Nancy Seiverd, President, CMI Credit Mediators, Inc.
