Late in December I signed up to a new broadband provider Vodafone and a technician came along and installed the cable modem and made sure the connection worked. I had to reset my router so I advised him I'd connect my own set up and follow up with the call centre if there were any issues. As it happens there was a quite unusual connection issue and a few hours later I found myself making a call to their Help Desk. Now my dealing with various Help Desks suggested to me that I would wait a long time to connect and when I finally got through they would have difficulty resolving the issue and eventually have to send a technician around again to fix the issue. I was already disappointed as I picked up the phone as it was a holiday weekend and it meant no internet access for several days I suspected.
Well the first pleasant surprise was that after negotiating the telephone tree, I got through to someone within a minute. I was run through a number of standard procedures which didn't fix the problem and then decided to swap out the router to eliminate the router as the source of the issue. Throughout this the Help Desk agent was patient and did some things remotely with the cable modem to reset it. Further tests and I was told my router wasn't connected, I then realised I hadn't connected the new one when I swapped it over. The Help Desk agent was very understanding considering a pretty simple customer error has wasted several minutes. Soon afterwards the internet cranked into life and a very thankful customer was back in business.
This is how things are meant to work, customer gets service restored at first point of contact and the Help Desk agent is able to actually assist the customer. I was impressed they could detect and resolve the issue remotely, I never felt I was being run through a script and the agent was friendly and understanding throughout. A few days later a customer survey turned up and I was able to rate the whole experience at the highest end of the scale and took the time to write comments about how positive the experience was. Now I wish that was always the experience you have with customer service although experience has shown unfortunately it isn't
This blog will be about my experience of service, what good service is and how we can improve service.
