Amazon.com customer service

[shardian]

I just contacted amazon customer service, and I just had to let someone know how frikkin sweet it is.

you tell them your phone # and when you want them to call you back. I told them to call immediately. My  phone rang pretty much as soon as I hit the button. I was in touch with a real person within 1 minute. No 1-800 numbers, no annoying menus, and no wait. This is by far the neatest customer service setup I have ever dealt with.

[AtomSmasher]

Thats pretty sweet.  The only other customer service I've had to deal with lately was newegg and they also had an excellent CS and dealt with my problem right away.

[jbox]

Call back is a great feature, but I've been happy using waiting services that aren't even that advanced, but have actually had some common sense applied during design. Two basic rules that *every* service should have:
- STOP PLAYING YOUR ---goshdarn--- AD! play some quiet enya only just so you know the phone is still live
- tell me where in the queue I am, so if the queue isn't moving I can know that and call back later. There is a big difference between three people in a checkout line with only a few items and one person with a whole shopping trolley full
- lastly, tell me what the mean of the last three waiting times were, so that if I'm tenth and the mean was ten minutes I know to expect about an hour wait

I usually hate calling customer service, as they tend to only get unhappy people call them for minimal wages. The funniest thing though was when I was calling my ISP to work out a connectivity issue and he asked me to check all my lines as a first step. I checked them, they were all right so I went back to tell him that to hear the dial tone! DOH! I had unplugged the phone to check the pins were all clean, but at least we both got a chuckle out of that when I called back. 

[shmokes]

When I was in high school I worked tech support for Packard Bell (who made the shittiest computers on the planet).  Average hold time was about an hour.  About half the people I talked to were already fuming mad by the time I said hello.

[Chris]

When I was in high school I worked tech support for Packard Bell (who made the shittiest computers on the planet).  Average hold time was about an hour.  About half the people I talked to were already fuming mad by the time I said hello.

I remember when Packard Bell got a customer service award from PC Magazine.  I was surprised by that until I read the text: "Packard Bell has single-handedly raised the average customer service level of the entire industry by going out of business."

Harsh.  Accurate, but harsh. 

[melarky]

I wonder if I talked to you shmokes, I had a packard bell and had to call all the time on it, I finally just gave up (they never were able to fix it).  Boy, that was a long time ago.  I had heard they had a pb call center in SLC or something, not sure if that's where my calls went (I am up in Logan).