Back in February I blogged about my mediocre customer service story with CapitolOne, and their egregiously bad use of speech recognition, coupled with lack of CTI into their contact center. However, things aren’t all bad in contact center land as I just had a quite opposite and stellar experience when I called Replacements Ltd.
For those of you not familiar with them, Replacements Ltd, is a clearing house for china, crystal and silver. They buy individual pieces or whole sets and resell them to people looking to replace missing or broken pieces in their sets. They aren’t cheap for sure, but they are the only game in town (other than eBay) if you are missing a piece from a china set, particularly one from a retired pattern. So, I when I saw an email come in from Replacements, I stopped what I was doing and looked at it. It was an opt-in email that is a watch list of pieces that are available in the china sets that I own (call me old fashioned, but I own quite a few). I’ve been on the hunt for a couple of wide rimmed pasta bowls from our 20+ year old every day Dansk pattern and this email said “We are contacting you because you have previously requested specific pieces from us in the pattern BROWN MIST-DENMARK by DANSK CHINA. Below are pieces we have recently received that match your request(s). In addition, a complete listing of all available inventory in this pattern, along with pricing and measurement information, is shown below. “It then listed a phone number to call (although I know I could also go on the web and order).
The last time I got one of these emails (many of the thousands of patterns they carry are discontinued, like this one) I sat on the email and didn't do anything. Then when I did inquire it was gone. So as soon as I saw this I jumped on the phone. Lo and behold the agent answered with "Is this Nancy Jamison?" Cool. Then she immediately asked if I was calling about the pasta bowls - even cooler. I so rarely get a contact center with CTI. They had all of my information, even though I hadn’t ordered in a couple of years, the call was quick and I was done. Bravo. All contact centers should be so customer friendly.
Of course, being an analyst, I asked her what software she was using and she said it just said Interaction Client, but didn’t say any more. As I have to make this quick and go back to work, I’m assuming that they are using Interactive Intelligence. If so, good job with this customer!