Seth Godin always has interesting things to say about…well…many subjects. Yesterday he posted this though which prompted me to add my own illustration here…

Two laptops go bad this month. Both are under first year warranty. One is mine. One belongs to a friend. Each laptop comes from a different, leading brand.

My friend’s experience first.
Hard disk error repeatedly comes up on the screen. She calls the vendor’s technical support and is rerouted to a 3rd party service provider.
She is asked to pay for escalation services on the spot (she panics) and in a pinch dispenses a couple hundred dollars over the phone. They have her enable remote access and install multiple diagnostic tools onto her machine. They ultimately determine that they have found a temporary fix, but that they would need to replace the hard drive. She spends more money (prepays) for a local technician (representing the vendor) to come to her location to replace the hard drive. Did I mention this machine was under warranty? After several days, she had not been contacted regarding the replacement. She calls the service provider to cancel the order. Rather than immediately refunding her money, she is badgered to keep the appointment and the representative insists that they would prefer to provide more services rather than makes refund. They also insisted that ‘once she experiences their service, she would be more than satisfied.’ She escalated. And escalated. And finally got the refund. Wow. Absolutely horrific.

My experience.
My CPU goes bad. I call tech support and speak with a representative for about 10 minutes to diagnose / offer preliminary information. He let’s me know that he needs to transfer me to his manager who has to authorize repairs. I speak to the manager for about 10 more minutes. By the time we finished, he had thanked me for my business at least 10 times, had confirmed that they would repair the machine and that we would do this via commercial shipping service, had given me an option to pay for expedited shipping – then WAIVED IT after I selected the option, and finally, had walked me through the entire procedure for the round-trip repair. WIthin about 10 minutes of hanging up, I received an email confirming those details along with a tracking number for the service order. I’m in mid-stream on an expected 5-7 business day turnaround.

The experience matters and it can make or break a brand relationship rather abruptly.

Granted, these are two data points which may be completely unique.
But one experience left the customer’s blood boiling.
The other, so far, has left the customer elated.

We’ll each remember the experience and will definitely remember the brand that ‘did it’ to us…

If anyone happens to stumble onto this, I would be interested to see if you have a thought as to which brands I’m referring to? Maybe a simple litmus test to see if reputations are accurately depicted here…