Good Customer Service

Good customer service seems to be so rare these days that when I encounter it, I like to blog about it.

A few days ago, I stopped in at the Subway on Katella & Glassell in Orange, CA to get a sandwhich. I asked for some cash back (which they normally don't do) and they tried but for some reason it didn't work. So she (the manager) just charged my card for a regular sandwich with no cash back.

I checked my balance later and discovered there was $20.36 still outstanding on my card from that store. I figured I'd give it a couple of days for their accounting to get straight and it would get credited back. It showed as a pending transaction, not a posted one. It didn't get credited back.

So I went back to the store today and fortunately the manager was there at the time. She remembered me and the transaction and explained to her I had been charged $20.36 that I should not have been charged. She did ask me if I had some sort of printout to show her but I did not. Rather than argue and fuss about it, she gave me my money back with no further questions. She said she would rather I remain a customer than be upset over losing $20.

THAT is customer service. The woman actually understood the dollar value of a customer. She took a calculated risk that I was either lying or mistaken and decided that $20 wasn't a big deal. The point isn't that she made a mistake, the point is, it was corrected in a timely and polite manner.

Contrast that to an experience I had a Del Taco once where they got my order for a chicken quesadilla wrong. I got just a plain one. Sure, they only charged me for a plain one but the person that took my order got it wrong. The manager took back my quesadilla, yelled back to the kitchen to make a chicken quesadilla and proceeded to try and charge me for the difference!

It was their mistake! He wanted 59 CENTS from me. I didn't pay it. I got a refund on my original quesadilla instead and told him I would never eat at his location again. This was after a little verbal banter wherein I attempted to explain that his employee wasted my time by making me come back and that certainly mitigates the 59 cents he wanted to charge me. He just couldn't see it.