Having spent waaaay too many years in retail management, I've come to appreciate good customer service and loathe bad customer service.  Whenever I encounter the former, I am sure to praise the person (and the supervisor thereof) who provided it.  With the latter, I often have to bite my tongue rather than offer retraining.

Today, however, I came up against a totally new customer service experience...one in which the person who was serving me made me want to serve them! 

There have been some issues over a power bill for my house that was originally in my ex-husband's name and which was recently switched over into my name.  The lady who originally helped me when I assumed the account switched the service address to my name, under a new account, but didn't backdate the account so that I assumed all charges during a certain billing period.  Instead, I received a significantly smaller bill and my ex received a bill for my address AND his own for two billing cycles.  Last week I went and paid the last known bill amount for this address in his name, along with my own bill for this address...but this week he received a letter stating a certain overdue amount was still outstanding (which he had not paid, and I had not yet assumed).  A collections threat was issued to him, which wasn't totally fair...but I still had no bill, and the amount he mentioned was the same as the amount he said his bill should be.  Hmmm...strange!  Needless to say, when I called the energy company I was unsure which amount was truly mine, and which was truly his, since I had just made two very large lump sum distributions to the company already.

Enter the customer service rep who ended up trying to tackle the double billing, dual accounts, multiple service addresses and payments made and due...along with a split cycle due to the error of the rep who first split the account...and payments made by both of us to our accounts over the past week or two.  AUGH.  When the poor guy mentioned he's been having a rough day, I could certainly empathize...and sympathize!  By the end of the 39 minute phone call, he admitted that there were so many things going on that he wanted to just tackle it for me in the morning. 

Enter my confusion.  He was probably three-quarters done.  Should I demand that he complete the changes at the (admitted by him) risk of creating more errors and confusion?  Or should I just trust him and assume that in the morning, when he's reporting to work refreshed and ready to deal with the problem as opposed to at the end of his work day when he's probably handled any number of complaints, snotty customers and computer problems? 

Needless to say, I chose the latter.  He has my cell phone number and promised to fix it all for me tomorrow, first thing, and to call me if he had any questions, concerns or problems.  The next statements will be cut on Friday, so he has a pretty tight timeline here to fix it all as it is...and since he provided excellent service to that point, I am going to trust that he will continue to do so.  And I'll have my bill in a week to verify all the changes. 

Wow.  How did it go from being my problem that my bill was incorrect to being my problem this fellow was having a pretty rough day?  Because it was easy to think of him as a fellow human because of his friendly, helpful manner.  Rather than just being a monotone voice on the other end of the line, he was pleasant, professional, and truly made an effort to solve my problem.  This, in turn, made me want to solve his, though I have no power to do so. 

At the very least, being able to laugh together about "typical Mondays" and not have complaints thrown his way may have made his day, and even week, go a bit smoother.  It's the least we, as consumers, can do, right?

Funny how far a bit of good customer service can go.