Customer Fixing Your Problems?

So we recently purchased a couple of high ends IBM servers for ourselves ( all the data crunching and Analytics needs some serious computing). The servers came all well packed and ready to be installed.

The IBM team came in for installation as promised. Installation complete, our Tech team happy.

Then Murphy kicked in. One of the server motherboards just packed in without warning.

Imagine the consternation all round. Server motherboards are not supposed to just go belly up and die without warning and most certainly not IBM server motherboards.

IBM was called in and within 30 hours, a new motherboard and a rather sheepish IBM engineer came by and fixed the problem and that was that.

Good, you say? , Yes, Good customer service indeed.

Now another story, of a Blackberry user.

A year and a half ago, he upgraded and got one of those new fancy Blackberry handsets.

Recently, one fine morning, woke up only to find his Blackberry was in electron heaven ( or whichever heaven it is that electronic devices die and go to).

So off he trotted to the Blackberry repair center in San Francisco. He was told that the unit in question could not be repaired and in any case, was beyond warranty.

He wanted to know what caused the device to just fade out without warning. The Blackberry technicians asked around, scratched their collective heads and confessed, they had no clue why this happened and had never seen anything like this before.

Ok, now the ace! Since Blackberry did not know what had occurred to the device and could not guess why it had stopped working, they offered a free replacement, despite not obligated to do so!
Why?

So that they could take the non-working device and analyze ( root cause analysis) why it had stopped working. And since this was helping Blackberry in fixing a problem, they felt it appropriate to reward the customer.

Better than Good? You bet!

You,

Acknowledge you have a problem
Acknowledge you have no clue why the problem occurred
Get an opportunity to fix it
Build customer loyalty while doing so
Create a great story that goes around

Can’t think of a better Service recovery story!