A story about service that makes you smile

You know that special smiley, tingly feeling you get when someone does the exact thing you want them to when you weren’t expecting it? Well let me give you a little example.

I own a beautiful pair of headphones, made by Incase. They make the 90 minute commute from the Badlands of Essex bearable. They broke about 4 weeks ago.

Incase are based in California, and they wanted me to pay for posting the broken part out to them, wait for them to test it and then wait even longer for a replacement. I’m an impatient bastard, so I asked if I could just buy a replacement part.

I had no response. This made me rather grumpy, so I Tweeted this:

Now, at this point Incase had no idea who I was, or even if I was a customer.

This made me rather surprised to receive this email:

I know this kind of service is possible, but I’ve never been fortunate enough to receive it. Intrigued, I wanted to know how they’d done it:

As for finding you/your info we use sprout social and it showed that you were on fb which, like your twitter page, also had a link to your site from which we found your last name. Luckily for us, there was only one Oli Watts in our system. We found your RMA and email support tickets and viola, here we are. Your RMA info was missing your zip and state/province but plugging in your address in google maps brought up any missing info.

We had most of the pieces, just needed to put them together.

Incase aren’t a massive corporation. They’re a medium sized business who make really well designed products. They could have chosen to invest more in R&D than customer service, but they didn’t because they get something a lot of people don’t.

The real value of ‘social media’ is to help create a conversation and to build a relationship. I’ve now got a relationship with Incase because not only did they show they cared, they followed through. Doing service like this is really hard, but the benefits can be rather exciting.