Customer Service at its Best

Not so long ago, I wrote about “Customer Service…at its Worst”, and an experience with the Simple brand of skincare products. Today, I experienced some of the best customer service I’ve seen for many years at Hotel Chocolat, a specialist chain of chocolate shops, at their outlet in Cambridge, UK.

This experience not only reassured me that the company cared about the quality of its products, but cared about their customer and their ongoing loyalty to the brand. Creating that level of reassurance with a customer is something every brand should strive for.

It started about 3 weeks ago when we purchased a box of Hotel Chocolat Turkish Delight as a small gift for a relative on her 89th birthday. The box cost over £12 but was beautifully presented. Visiting her last week she told us that when she opened it and tried a small piece, it tasted dreadful. She then noticed mould growth on the product. Checking the sell-by date, it was well within the date given. We said that we would return the item.

On visiting the shop today, the assistant we spoke to immediately inspected the product and called the store manager. With no questions they refunded the cost of the product and gave us, in addition to this, a large box of their best selling chocolates. They took our details and said the product would be sent away for analysis and their head office would be in touch with us as soon as this was complete.

This action stood out in a world of average service because:

• The priority was to maintain customer loyalty
• They went out of their way to ensure we knew that the complaint was being taken seriously
• They ensured that we were satisfied with the refund but also would try their best selling line to reassure us of their normal high quality standards
• We felt that the business as a whole supported this attitude and that they were not only satisfying the initial complaint but wanted to find out why it happened so that it didn’t happen again.

This is what word-of-mouth-marketing is all about. A great customer experience as a result of an initial complaint that not only retains the loyalty of that customer but is shared with others – marketing can’t get any better.

Well done Hotel Chocolat!

Customer Service…at its worst

As a marketer, you learn a lot from a bad customer service experience – the impact on the customer, the eagerness they feel to share their experience with others and how not to get it so wrong in your own business.

My most recent experience is with a company called Accantia. Not a company I’d heard of, though one with well known brands such as Wright’s and Cidal soaps and their best known brand, Simple.

Simple is quoted on thier website as “the leading brand of soap, skin care and toiletries products designed to respect the needs of sensitive skin”.

In fact one product in particular ‘Simple – Kind to Eyes Balm’ is stated to be “a perfect blend of active ingredients and multivitamins to reduce puffiness and refresh tired eyes. Perfect for even sensitive skin.”

Not so, I’m afraid. After a single use of a product costing around £4 I ended up with a hospital visit for eyes that were so swollen that I could barely see out of them, and to top it all, over £17 cost for prescriptions for steroid and antihistamine tablets and hydrocortizone creams.

As you can imagine, my first port of call was an e-mail to the company, Accantia on the Sunday evening, detailing the experience, the outcome and sending photographs of the hideous result of using ‘Simple Kind to Eyes Balm’.

By the following Thursday the company had failed to respond. I searched their website for an alternative contact point, to find only their PR Agency’s details at Beattie Communications. Credit to them they must have forwarded my details back to Accantia who responded on the Friday saying “Please accept our apologies in the delay in responding but having checked our e-mails, I am unable to locate your original e-mail.”

Interestingly, they actually responded as a reply to my original e-mail!

I was asked to reply giving my full details so that they could “deal with [my] enquiry in a professional manner”.

This I did and one week later I received a letter containing a £5 Boots voucher “entirely without prejudice” to “reimburse [me] for the product” but asking me to return the product at my own expense and complete a 2 page questionnaire regarding my experience.

 Lessons learned:

• Respond to your customer queries and complaints within a realistic timeframe – maximum 1 working day
• Do not deny receiving the original contact if you know this actually was not the case – emails, particularly, are easy to track
• Refund in full any expense which results from the use of the product you supplied
• Telephone the customer and engage in conversation – research can be done during this phone call and a friendly response from a professional and well briefed menber of staff can often placate an angry customer
• Don’t ask the customer to do anything at their own expense to help your research
• Where you take it from there is up to you as a business but get the basics right as a minimum
• Remember, what was once word of mouth with a small group of friends, is now much broader, as people share experiences with larger communities via the web.

So the outcome for me? I won’t be purchasing ‘Simple’ products, that’s clear. I also won’t be recommending them.

Will I be completing the two page questionnaire and returning the product? It’s a difficult one to answer. From a marketer’s point of view, I am interested to see where this takes me and how they handle the issue. But from a personal perspective I am still too angry to help them, at my own expense, having already personally funded hefty presctiption charges as a result of their product.

What would you do?