On Friday I had two rather shocking customer service experiences.  Shocking in that they went well (for me).

In the morning, I had to visit the DMV* office to register my car.  I waited 20 minutes in line, reached the front, and discovered, as usual, that I had one form wrong and was missing another.  To my surprise, the DMV agent went out of her way to help me fix one form, and called the state tax office to verify that I’d paid my property taxes (eliminating the need for the other form – a tax receipt).  It took about 20 minutes to get all this stuff cleared up (there were other windows helping the other customers, BTW), but this undoubtedly underpaid agent went out of her way to help me even though I was missing forms.  Helpful agents going above and beyond.  At the DMV…

Later, I called Belkin to try to get tech support for a KVM switch they’d sent me (as a replacement for an earlier one which also didn’t work).  When it became clear that the new one wouldn’t work either, I thought I was hosed, as I’d bought the original one from a third party vendor back in March - $200 down the drain.  Amazingly, I was transferred to a customer service rep. who promptly offered a refund.  I faxed her my invoice, she scheduled a UPS pickup, at my door, of the non-working units, and I should be whole again in about a week.  I don’t think I’ve ever had a manufacturer issue a refund check for something I didn’t buy directly from them.

Offsetting these experiences a bit, I discovered that a 15 minute phone call I’d made to the Philippines, for which I’d expect to pay maybe 50 cents a minute, had been billed at $3.50 a minute.  Adding the international calling plan onto my phone service (at $3.99 a month), drops this rate to $.16 a minute.  So they charge the casual international caller 20 times more than they charge the price astute caller who’s bothered to find out what plans are available and signed up for the right one.  Ouch.  Reminds me of visiting Disneyworld this January, where I noticed, in very very fine print on page 4 of the 7 page hotel sign-in, that using my room phone for domestic long distance billed at $6.00 a minute (i.e. roughly 100 times more than most people pay per minute on their cell phone).  Sometimes you don’t bother checking prices because you don’t think it’ll make much difference – a 10 minute phone call – hey what’s it gonna cost – five dollars, maybe?  Maybe not…

* Alright, fellow Missourians will note that we don’t go to the DMV for these kinds of services – it was actually a franchised license office.  But they call it a DMV office in most states, so it was a clarity simplification…