I am lucky in my work that I get to travel the world over and this means experiencing dealing with all kinds of services. Here are some of my personal experiences of the best and worst customer service to date. Of course these are subjective opinions and customer service can improve and go down hill at any time!
The best customer service
My experience generally has always been that the USA has been really good for customer service. I have traveled all over the USA and some of my favorite cities include New York, Nashville, San Francisco, Austin and Seattle. Stores and restaurants are usually of a very high standard and its unusual to find poor customer service. Some of the best stores include B and H Photo and Rudy’s Music in NYC, Wild Ginger restaurant also in NYC and Hill Country Guitars (no longer open) in Austin Texas.
The USA was always my reference point, until I traveled to Japan. Japan is a whole different level of customer service, quite mind blowing. All my experiences in Japan have been superb. The transport system is fantastic, with the bullet train being the gold standard for rail travel. All the hotels I have stayed in have been excellent and the Japanese really understand and appreciate the value of looking after clients.
Airlines
I travel a lot, especially to Asia, USA and Europe. The best airline experiences have been with Etihad and Emirates. Both have had terrific service, great food and crucially great communication with customers. I always know I am in safe hands with these companies. KLM used to be great, BUT once they merged with Delta, they went downhill. In recent times British Airways have been good.
The Worst customer service experiences
I often talk about the worst customer experiences in trainings. Sometimes I am speechless at how unaware some companies are. In the UK PC World get the award for the worst service. I have literally been in a store with cash ready to buy an item and all they have to do is put it in a bag and still they manage to have me leave the store! Sometimes its lack of product knowledge and sometimes they simply don’t care.
As well as physical stores, customer service online can be variable. Again many businesses don’t appreciate that it doesn’t take much to have good manners when dealing with people. The best example in recent times was on a social media platform called Drooble where I asked a few probing questions about some of the paid services they were offering. Rather than respond in a polite manner I received the following hilarious response
Plamen Todorov@ you are one annoying ****, aren’t you? Learn to appreciate what others are doing for you instead of hating! It’s so simple, if you don’t like it, don’t use it – I promise, not gonna wipe out my tears!
Now that’s how to lose customers! LOL
