Good customer service

With all the poor customer service that is out there these days, we hear way too much complaining, justified or not. There are some companies out there that still treat their customers well and we do not hear about them enough. With that in mind, I’m going to share a story I have about one such company.
About a year and a half ago I renovated my bathroom. Part of the renovation was replacing the basic fixtures with some nice fixtures from Kohler. During installation it became apparently that the piece of plastic inside a handle on the sink faucet was broken. Unfortunately we had already paid for the plumber so we needed to finish installation anyway. I called up Kohler and they of course offered to send the replacement piece free of charge and since the installation for the repaired part was merely to screw the new piece on I would finish it myself.
A week or so went by and the replacement piece came in. As I was screwing in the new piece, to my horror, I heard a snap. Sure enough the screw which was made out of some light weight material had snapped off inside the handle. Now I needed a replacement handle (and screw)! I called up Kohler, and with no problems at all they offered to send a replacement handle, free of charge.
Happily when the new handle came in, it was installed without issue and I was happy.
Last month, while climbing into the shower, my knee accidently hit the diverter for the shower on the tub faucet. It snapped off. All that snapped was a tiny metal bar that connects the diverter to the spout, but unfortunately that part was not packaged separately so they offered to send me an entire new spout, free of charge.
This week the spout came in, but unfortunately it was the wrong model. This was partly my fault, as I could not remember the model number. I described it to the support people and they guessed what it was. Turns out there are two models that look identical, but have different connectors on the inside, and sure enough I was sent the wrong one. I called up Kohler again; they figured out the problem and offered to send me the new spout, free of charge. They then asked if I wouldn’t mind sending them back the other spout they sent me, and would refund me the shipping charge.
I must say this story does make their products sound bad, which was not my intention. My intention was to applaud their excellent customer service.

Vote America!

Vote!, originally uploaded by Paguma.

Congrats Mariah!

Mariah managed to do something so many of her peers have trouble with, she remembered to wear underwear for her performance on Saturday Night Live. Good job Mariah!

Of course, if your dress went a couple inches below your stuff it might not have been as important.

Dina's Sing a long

Dina asked me to make her a CD of songs she likes to sing a long to for the car. Here's a snapshot of her musical tastes! Not all the songs are from the 80s! :-)

Elastica - Connection
Matt Mays - On the Hood
Garbage - Only Happy When it Rains
Hawksley Workman - Striptease
INXS - Need you Tonight
Edwin Collins - Never Met a Girl Like you Before
The Breeders - Cannonball
Van Halen - Finish What Ya Started
Bif Naked - Tango Shoes
Def Leppard - Photograph
Nine Inch Nails - Closer
New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle
54-40 - Ocean Pearl
Foreigner - Urgent
Scandal - The Warrior
Tom Petty - Leaning to Fly
Savage Garden - I Want You
The Motels - Only the Lonely
UB40 - Red Red Wine
Depeche Mode - Enjoy the Silence

Taking advantage of Canadians!

Too many companies are currently taking advantage of Canadians. Many of the price discrepancies on products still reflect the currency exchange at it's worst. For the past year, the Canadian dollar has mostly be worth about the same or more than the US$.

Today I decided I was going to use a small part of my bonus to buy a set of extension tubes for my camera. After looking locally I noticed they were selling for $250. I did a quick check on the internet and found that Amazon.com sells the same product for $170. That's a 47% mark-up for the Canadian audience. Absolutely ridiculous. So I went to order it online from Amazon, and they tried to charge me $52 to ship it to me! It weighs only 11.2 ounces!

It's times like this I'm glad that I have friends in the USA. Shipping in the USA was free, so I shipped it to a friend in the USA, who will then repackage it and ship it to me. I expect it will cost $10-$15 for him to ship it to me, which still leaves me with a $65-70 savings on a fairly small item.

jerks, jerks I tell ya!

Are they really that stupid?

I had a $5 coupon for Best Buy that was going to expire this morning, so I thought I'd go online and check if there were any CDs I wanted that were reasonably priced. I found three CDs that I wanted that were marked down in some promotion. To my surprise, there was also some sort of customer appreciation sale where all CDs were 10% off. I ordered them online, but opted for in-store pick-up to save the shipping charge. I figured I could quickly run out to the local store at lunch and pick them up.

Boy was I wrong! They couldn't get their computer to sell them to me for the same price as the order I had already played. The best part was when they actually expected me to pay more because they couldn't figure out how to enter the price in their computer. It took them over 30 minutes and three salespeople to figure it out. The poor girl was getting frustrated but she was also getting a little snotty with me, like it's my fault her computer is a piece of crap.

Oh, and to top off the whole experience, my order was randomly chosen for a customer survey!

Home from hockey early again...

I'm home from hockey early again tonight.

Third time this season. Just after the half way point a player on the other team lost his footing and slammed into the boards awkwardly. I'm not sure what his injury was but his screaming filled the arena for quite awhile. I suspect either a broken ankle or a dislocated knee.

Same thing happened before Christmas. In a similar situation another member of the opposing team dislocated his knee.

Two weeks ago, our goaltender temporarily lost his mind and slashed a player accidentally hitting him in the head. It resulted in him getting himself kicked out of the game. We don't carry a backup goalie and nobody felt like putting on the gear, so we had to forfeit.

So this was the 3rd shortened game for me this season.