How’s this for awesome customer service? We were settling in late last Saturday morning to watch some college football when my wife and I decided that we wanted to get some takeout from our local burger joint. While they offer counter service and a drive-through, their motto is “We don’t serve fast food. We serve good food.” Thus, it takes a bit longer than a plain old fast food restaurant. Thus, I wanted to call ahead and place our order so it would be ready to pick up when we got there.

Unfortunately, they were in the midst of the lunch rush and were unable to answer the phone. Instead, I got an answering machine. This is actually understandable, as it’s a pretty small family operation and they often get swamped. Since I don’t like talking to answering machines, I hung up without leaving a message and returned to the pre-game show.

About 30 minutes later, the phone rang. I jokingly told my wife that it was the restaurant calling back. Guess what? It was! Even though I hadn’t left a message, they checked their caller ID and rang us up to see what we needed. Needless to say, we were favorably impressed. We’re already loyal customers, but this just cemented the relationship. Mega-corporations like Dish Network needs to take a page from their book.

Miracle of miracles, I got an e-mail response from Dish Network saying that they’ve credited our account for $3.99 to make up for the pay-per-view movie that we never ordered. Interestingly, shortly after I sent my response, I checked the settings on our Dish receiver. Guess what? PPV was already locked out. So… Despite what they said in their initial response, it is possible for their system to make mistakes. But… At least they did the right thing in the end.

Moral of the story: If you know you’re right, don’t let a company stonewall you.

I’ve had my share of troubles with Dish Network customer service in the past, but this just about takes the cake… This past month, our bill was a bit higher than normal. When I investigated, I discovered that we were charged $3.99 for a pay-per-view movie that we never ordered. No, $3.99 isn’t a huge deal. But after all the trouble that they’ve given us, I’m not willing to pay them a penny more than absolutely necessary. [more]

Now this is brilliant. Instead of simply using their customer’s shopping history data for marketing purposes, grocery chain Meijer has decided to put their Orwellian insights to good use… They’ve started printing product recall information on the bottoms of receipts when a customer that has previously purchased a recalled product comes through the checkstand. Now that’s what I call customer service! If only someone would’ve notified us of the fact that we bought a bunch of potentially metal-laced bread… Instead, we ate it, oblivious to the potential risk. Oh well, it tasted good. And besides, our intestines weren’t sliced to ribbons, so we really don’t have anything to complain about.

[Source: The Consumerist]

Well, yesterday went far better than I expected… The Dish Network tech showed up at 10AM, smack dab in the middle of the promised 8AM to noon window. He came into the house, ran a few diagnostics, and then decided that he needed to replace the ’switch’, which is the part of the dish assembly that is out on the end of the arm pointing back toward the dish itself. Once he swapped it out, everything worked perfectly. Before he left, the tech gave me his card and said we should call the local office directly if we have any further trouble in the next couple of weeks. And then about an hour after he left, I received a call from Dish just checking to make sure that the tech had come by and that everything was working. Given all the problems we’ve had with their shoddy customer service, this totally blew me away. In fact, if I wasn’t so sick and tired of their crap, they would’ve scored a few points in my book for following up like that. If only they had approached our entire series of interactions like that… Regardless, things are now back up and running, and will hopefuly remain that way for the forseeable future.

For all the trouble that we’ve had with Dish Network, this is hardly surprising… Our service has been out since Sunday night. Actually, it started acting funky Sunday night and then pretty much went down on Monday. On Monday night, I called for technical service and explained to the guy that we were having problems with TVs hooked to both boxes, which indicated to me that it was the dish itself, and not the boxes that were acting up. I also ran down a list of Dish-endorsed troubleshooting steps that I had taken. His response? [more]

Before I jump in on the topic at hand, I thought I’d highlight an interesting little tidbit from a commenter who claims to be a former Dish Network employee: [more]

This is getting really, really old… When I last wrote about our Dish Network customer service problems, I was confident that they had been solved. But I was wrong… While we did receive the $49.99 credit for ‘free’ installation, we’re still being charged for the Home Protection plan (essentially an extended warranty on the equipment that’s supposed to be free for 18 months). Fortunately, I got the name and extension of the person that was helping me so I could call her back. Unfortunately, I keep getting her voice mail and she never calls back. [more]

Wow, it feels like this site is rapidly devolving into a consumer bitch fest. But here we go again… We recently ordered two sets of ash bunkbeds from SimplyBunkBeds.com (a subsidiary of NetShops, Inc.) and when they showed up, they were made out of pine. And when we checked with the manufacturer, we learned that this model really is supposed to be made of pine, as opposed to ash. In other words, we were misled by the information provided by SimplyBunkBeds.com. Not only this, but they totally screwed up the order… [more]