I feel like people mostly rant in anger / annoyance about customer service, so I want to balance it out with two positive recent experiences.  They’re brief but the companies still deserve kudos.

First, RueLaLa.  For our snowboarding trip to Stratton Mountain, we bought a couple of “X2” passes on RueLaLa in a nice discount.  We read the details, including the fine-print, and it seems like one X2 pass per person was fine, and each such pass was good for two days of lift tickets.  Perfect for our weekend!

But on showing up at the mountain we were told we mis-read the coupon.  It was one per person, fine, but each one only got us a day of lift tickets and the second day was $20 off.  This seemed strange, so we argued and debated with a manager for a bit.  But eventually we just wanted to go snowboarding and stop wasting time, so we caved.

Yesterday (a Saturday) we filed a complaint with RueLaLa.  Here’s the nice thing: someone called us (!) within a couple of hours (again, on a Saturday!!), apologized several times, said they’ll talk to the resort, refund the coupon, and give us a $20 extra credit in our account for our trouble.  Wow!  Nice job, RueLaLa.

The other good service example is from Nespresso.  We have a coffee machine from them at home (the Citiz and Milk with a frother — awesome!), and it’s been great, but a couple of weeks ago the frother mysteriously broke.  We looked around, cleaned it, looked for broken stuff, but there were no hints at all.

So we called Nespresso, and rather than ask a lot of questions or shuttle us off to some third-party appliance repair shop, they just mailed us a new one, at no charge, right then and there.  It arrived a couple of days later (they ship everything as 2-days or overnight, at no extra charge), it works, and that incident is over.  Nice job, Nespresso!

These things definitely increase my brand loyalty and make for nice word-of-mouth / referral marketing.