Customer Service

Customer Service

Paul Arden | Tuesday, 11 April 2023

Recently I’ve had some wonderful customer service from Garmin here in Malaysia. My heart rate monitor stopped working and so I contacted Garmin Malaysia, and since I bought it less than 12 months ago, they asked me to post it down. Their technicians agreed with me and so they shipped me a new one. I had to pay the return courier charges, which was 9MYR (about 2 US dollars). I also have a Garmin bike computer and I had lost the small rubber end cap and so they sent me a replacement free of charge. During all communications the customer service was both efficient and friendly. I communicated first via email and then later via WhatsApp and always received very prompt and friendly replies.

That’s an example of excellent customer service. I would recommend this company, not just because they manufacture excellent products, but also, because when there is a problem, they fix it quickly and it’s a pleasant experience.

Contrast this to my, also recent, problems with Malaysian Airlines. When I flew out to the UK for Xmas, a delay caused my Penang flight to miss my connecting KL-Heathrow flight. “Damn”, I thought, “still, my next flight is now in 10 hrs time. I’ll get some sleep”. And sure enough after queueing for 45 minutes I was given a meal, taxi and hotel voucher and told “to buy some takeaway food at the airport because the hotel has none!” Where am I going? I thought.

I visited the top floor of the airport to get some food and found my taxi at the bottom floor, about an hour later. But then we had to wait for some other people, which took yet another hour. To cap the experience off, the hotel was a 50min drive… each way!!! Now I really can’t sleep on planes; it’s just far too cramped and uncomfortable, and so I was looking forward to an important pre-post-delayed-flight sleep, and I got slightly over 2hrs. There are hotels at the airport!!! Why pick a hotel that is 50mins drive away? Crazy. If I had known what I was getting in to, I would have slept on the airport floor.

So that was flying out. Not too happy, but it’s Christmas, so fuck it. Flying back again, I was a bit concerned about my luggage. I had bought a spare Minn Kota thruster trolling motor, because you can’t get them in Malaysia, and it was pushing my luggage weight up to dangerously high levels. Extra luggage is notoriously expensive! So I checked the Internet to see what it was going to cost. Top hit, all the information I needed and then some! 135RM for every extra 5KG overweight.  That’s about 30USD. Pretty darned reasonable!!

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So I bought some extra cheese, like about 5KG worth, olives – both green and black – and capers – another 2.5KG!!! Fantastic. I love olives and I can’t find those in Malaysia either.

I’m now exactly 9KG overweight. I’m thinking that they may charge me just one of the 30USD/5KG blocks, if I smile and I’m friendly, possibly two if I meet Stalin. But hey man, it’s cheese and olives, so it’s worth it! I arrive at the airport… 270USD excess luggage fees!!! WTF??? And next to me, a couple dealing with a different check in representative, only got charged for less than half their excess weight. Lucky them, unlucky me, how odd, I didn’t know I was playing the lottery.

This is all pretty bad now. You know I’m a fairly reasonable bloke but I really don’t like having it stuck up me. Flying out with 2 hrs sleep, when I should have had 7. Coming back, finding out that the top hit on the Internet explaining luggage fees was either wrong or had changed… and by a factor of 5. And so I wrote to the airline…

And now we enter the customer service world. The first thing I notice is how incredibly difficult it is to enter this world. No email contact. No WhatsApp contact. Nothing on the front page of the website. Hidden away, in some obscure website corner, I find a way to contact customer service and I send a nice polite message explaining my woes.

For a while I hear nothing, apart from the automated “thank you for choosing Malaysian Airlines” email. And then ten days later, I get a message “We are currently investigating the incident you reported and you will hear from us within 7-14 calendar days”. And then for the next four weeks, every week on the dot, I get the exact same message. But the bit that really annoys me at this stage, and is obviously intended to get up my nose, is that it is sent from a “no-reply” email address. I can’t tell you how much this winds me up. That’s the biggest FU on the internet. “We can talk to you, but you can’t talk to us”!!

Finally, I get a message from (apparently) a real person, with an actual email address, that said “Pertaining to your feedback, we are currently investigating with the relevant department and shall come back with the findings. We will closely following up this matter and provide you with an update as soon as we have the information.”  I got that message almost two months ago and despite having an email address, that one would reasonably expect one could get a reply from, they haven’t answered any of my emails and it’s now almost certainly under the carpet.

So that to me is an example of really shitty customer service.

Now at the end of the day I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. You can get stressed about these things in life and give yourself a heart attack. I’ll just never fly with them again. Problem solved.

And that’s really the key isn’t it? On the one hand, with Garmin, I get this wonderful service and feel great with positive vibes. On the other, I don’t know what I was expecting, but a genuine reply would have been nice. It just doesn’t measure up to how I treat people and would like to be treated myself. The hotel was too far away, and had no food, and they don’t have the top hit on Google with respect to excess luggage charges, and haven’t written to the people who do have it to have it corrected. I just get the impression, rightly or wrongly, that they just don’t care.

It annoys me, perhaps more than it should, because I was actually what one would call a “loyal” customer. I had taken to booking with them exclusively, and directly through their website. I even recommended them to our visiting guests. Not any more though. If they don’t respect me as a customer, then I won’t be a customer. I’ll look to Singapore Airlines instead.

Anyway, bearing all this in mind, what I want to talk about is Sexyloops customer service. Because that’s me!!! I am your friendly customer service representative! And I will go to the ends of the Earth to solve any problem you might have. I know I’m not perfect. Close, yes, but perfect, certainly not. You can ask my wife for confirmation of this fact.

But you can Whatapp me +60198549552 You can email me noreply@sexyloops.com (only kidding!): paul@sexyloops.com You can Board message me, Zoom me, communicate via telepathy.  It all works and I am here – maybe just backup your telepathy with one of the other channels.

Customer service is not how good you are when the sailing is smooth. It’s how you respond in the midst of a hurricane. And sometimes it’s not even your own damn fault! Royal Mail parcel force has been terrible this year. But Spanish Post? I honestly do not know how anyone does business in Spain. They are so bad it is unbelievable. Even the Spaniards say it’s bad, but that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface as to how truly appalling they are.

I have one customer in Tasmania. Really good customer, has just about all our rods, really nice guy, serious angler, from time to time sends photos of trout and HT rods. He broke an HT8. And in the middle section.

The middle is a problem for fitting and it’s because with premium rods (read: Sexyloops HTs) we often use different sloping mandrels for different sections. Consequently there is craftsmanship involved in making the ferrules fit. And so we need the ferrules back, in order to make new, perfectly-fitting, middle sections. Butt and Tip no problems; those can go straight out of our stock. But the middle section – this needs fine-tuning.

Until recently, and as a consequence of the story I’m about to unfold, we had our international customers post broken sections (not the full rod, not with Spain!) back to Spain. So Gavin posted the broken sections. And…  three months later, Spanish Customs sent them back to him. WTF? So Gavin, persistent chap that he is, sent them back to Spain. Three months later… Spanish customs sent them back to Gavin. Huh??

Houston, we have a problem. I said to Gavin, “take a hacksaw and cut the ferrules off, take a Stanley knife and cut the rings off, stick everything in an envelope and send them to Spain!” Gavin did so, and Spanish Customs lost the package.

I’m like WTF?? W.T.F??? I cannot fathom this. So look, Gavin is getting the runaround here. It’s been a year since he fell on his rod in an over-ambitious fishing moment, and we still haven’t even seen it. So we built Gavin a new rod. Free of charge. It’s not my fault, but I have to solve the problem for my customer. At some point you just have to pull the pin and take full responsibility.

We don’t send anything back to Spain nowadays by the way, unless you are in the EU. Everything now goes to Lee in the UK and we fit middle sections out of existing stock. I don’t ever want to have a customer of ours have to go through any of that crap again.

If you are in customer service, then you are the front end of the business and must do your absolute best; after all, customers are your business. They feed you. Without them you have no business. If you don’t see them as close friends, then you probably shouldn't even be in business.

It might sound strange, but I always see problems as an opportunity. They are an opportunity to build relationships, to shine, and to get things done. Most businesses in the fly fishing world, I’m happy to say, are actually really quite excellent.  And that’s a great thing. Maybe not quite as good as we are, but that’s not a bad thing either!

Alrighty I have four videos to edit. An Interview, two casting coaching videos and a fishing one! Have a great week!

Cheers,
Paul
Your Sexyloops friendly customer relations representative.

 

PS yes that is a Snakehead!!! :)))