2 Views of Customer Service

I've been a customer of drugstore.com for a couple of years. The prices are reasonable and I get my prescription in a week or so. Or, I should say the week delivery time was standard until my last order. When I did not receive my order in two weeks, I called them. I had no trouble finding someone who wanted to help; the phone number on the web site put me in touch with someone who could solve my problem. In a few minutes he reported back to me that they had screwed up and the prescription would be forthcoming by overnight mail. I did not ask for overnight mail but the customer service rep wanted to get my order to me as quickly as possible. The next day I received an e-mail with a credit for a future purchase. Again, I did not ask for this.

Contrast this with my experience with Sprint. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the difficulties I had getting Sprint to honor its commitments within a reasonable time frame. In this case I had written to Dan Hesse, Sprint CEO, to get some action with resolving our concerns. I did talk to someone in Executive Services who said we would not have our service stopped because there was a dispute with regards to credits Sprint promised us. Well, yesterday, without warning or any form of notice one of our phones was cut off from service and the man in Executive Services could do nothing about it unless I paid the full bill then and there, even though the full bill did not take into account our credits because Sprint, being a very efficient organization, had yet to post all of the credits to which we were entitled. Clearly, as soon as I can get out of the Sprint contract I will. They made it difficult to reach a responsible party. In effect, they were willing to tell a good customer to take a hike. No one had the courtesy to even acknowledge receipt of my letter.

Which company would you prefer to deal with? Drugstore.com realized that I was paying part of the customer service rep's salary, Sprint did not. I give them another five years or less and there will no longer be the Sprint we know.