A tale of two customer experiences

In the past 24 hours, I have had two diametrically opposed customer experiences. One was delightful, the other made me cancel my account.

I used to bank with a large national bank. When the wife (Disclosure: the wife works for Amazon but does not read my blog) and I married, we consolidated accounts to another bank, but kept this account to have a local presence. This arrangement worked for the last 7 years. Yesterday, I received my statement which included in my opinion ridiculous fees. Now, I was never informed that these fees would be incurred. The statement was the only notification. I am sure that there was some fine print that I missed; however nearly $20 for a “free checking” account is just poor business. I went to the local branch to close the account and they did do their best to try to keep my business. Given how these fees were incurred, large unnamed bank did not want my business any longer, so I was happy to oblige.

This afternoon, I re-started working on a project to extend a WiFi antenna into my attic. This has long been on my to-do list. During the basement remodel when I wired the house with coax and Cat 5e, I even ran a 50 ohm coax cable into the basement to extend the antenna. I never finished the project. Recently, I purchased what I believed to be the correct TNC connectors. Well, I goofed. I bought the wrong ones. The return process from Amazon (Disclosure: the wife does not work for the retail side of Amazon) was dead simple. I was not even required to return the connectors. Amazon just gave me the refund! While I may be a great customer, the shipping and restocking costs were likely more than the cost of the connectors. Not only does it make good business sense, it is an incredible customer experience. Hey, I am even blogging about it.

So who are you, large unnamed bank or Amazon? Can you delight customers while still making sound business decisions? How will your customers rate their experiences? Keep these questions in mind and stay customer obsessed in 2012!