Customer Service: The 10 Best (and Worst) Companies

Wow. That has not been my experience.

Stores tend to be as good or bad as the people working there (and in particular the managers who run things.) Sometimes you run into someone having a bad day, sometimes you find someone who’s a great people person. I don’t think individual anecdotes are very reliable for labeling an entire company - you really need to look at company wide policies.

Best Buy - I’ve stepped in when I heard some kid working there just completely BSing an elderly couple looking to buy their son a laptop. “Oh, if he’s primarily using it for gaming you’ll really need to also buy him one of these 300 Gig Seagate external drives , because the RAM on a laptop really isn’t sufficient to run today’s games.” I stepped in and told the couple the guy didn’t have a clue what he was talking about and then went looking for the manager of the department.

Same store, a few months later: the Canon camera I bought for my daughter’s birthday developed a big crack in the LCD screen. It was about 3 months old. I went in assuming that all I would get from them was the address of the warranty center to which I could send it, at best maybe have them take it and send it in for me. The manager of the camera section heard me say that it was my daughter’s birthday present and he said “Well, that stinks, her birthday present is broken!” and he swapped it out for a new one, right there on the spot. Far above and beyond what I would expect.

So based on my anecdotes, BB has the worst customer service, bordering on fraudulent behavior. They also have the best customer service, going above and beyond expectations to make their customers happy.

That guy was trying to cancel an account that was in his name that his father used.

No, it was his father’s account.

“AOL said because the account was in his name they needed to talk to him to cancel it.”

Other oddities from the same story:
“This was about six months after the death.”

What was he waiting for? Did he not know the account existed?

“They then even said that they billed my father for the six months each month. We had moved and never recieved these”

No, from this it seems like he had an AOL account that his whole family used that was in his father’s name. So he didn’t cancel because he was using the service(did he think AOL became free?). What sort of moron thinks moving and not informing the biller is an excuse?

My many years at EB taught me that yes, a lot of times it is the customer making a big deal out of nothing or a firm policy. But Best Buy does suck ass. I have had many irritating experiences there - nothing I would rush to my computer and write about but things that made me think less of the company. In fact, virtually every time I ask for some help of some sort (i.e. not just grab what I want and take it to the register) I have had some sort of hassle. Sometimes when I do just grab what I want and go to the register I have a problem. And I know it’s not me, because it doesn’t happen anywhere else and I am more humble at stores than I really should be (again, because I worked in a store for a long time). No, it’s definitely the store.

CC though, never had a problem.