The topic of this entry (at least by overly demanding American
standards) is a rare find in Moldova. Store clerks do not ask "How
are you?" when you enter a shop. Asking bus or marshutka drivers for
directions have been (in my case) greeted with slammed doors or a
flurry of Russian, Romanian, and Gagauzian that is loosely translated
as "Don't bother me." There is no waiting in line - only pushing and
shoving and crowding and cutting. People tend to yell a lot if there
is some kind of problem, usually upset because of the ignorance of
the customer. The mantra, "The customer is always right" has been
altered slightly to read, "The customer is usually stupid, wrong and
not worth my time."
So you can imagine my surprise when I happened upon a very competent
and helpful young woman, Nina, on Saturday in the city of Cahul in
the Voxtel (my cell phone company) store. My cell phone is recharged
by purchasing a card at various kiosks throughout Moldova. One
scratches off the back of the card to uncover a 16-digit number,
which one then phones in and presto - more minutes. So, in the
process of scratching off the back of my latest card, I also
scratched off parts of a few of the 16 digits. Some numbers might
have been 8's or 6's or 3's. Others could have been 2's or 7's.
Some might have even been Chinese characters.
I tried entering various combinations and even went so far as to make
an official list of the possibilities so I didn't accidentally repeat
my attempts. After about 20 tries, my phone service refused to allow
me to even attempt to enter a new combination - there must be some
kind of limit as to the number of incorrect attempts you can make.
So now I had a fairly expensive and potentially useless phone card;
very few minutes on my phone; and even if I bought a completely new
card my phone wouldn't even allow me to enter any 16-digit number,
correct or otherwise.
So when I explained the situation to Nina and she said, "No problem"
I thought she probably didn't understand the situation. Perhaps my
explanation was lost in the translation. I explained again and
received the same reply. She took my card and ID, copied them both,
wrote a little note, and faxed it to Chisinau and within half an hour
I had my minutes. I was in and out of the store in 10 minutes.
Problem solved. Made my day. I love competence.
3 comments:
Brad,
It's great to read about good customer experiences. They're hard to find nowadays :)
I wrote about your experience on my customer service blog.
Thanks for sharing!
~Maria Palma
YOU WROTE: The mantra, "The customer is always right" has been
altered slightly to read, "The customer is usually stupid, wrong and
not worth my time."
it is funny, this was my experience Nicaragua as well..except for perhaps w/o the gruffness. I think it really takes a while for capitalism to fully catch on.
Guys,
maybe you will be surprised,but frankly speaking US customer service is no better. Example from my life. I was waiting airline ticket shipped with Fedex Overnight. At 5 AM package was in my city as shown in web tracking, due to be delivered at 8 AM. But at 7AM they sent it to another state.
Called them - why, what for? No answer. They delivered it the day after, I missed my flight and no longer needed it, so I shipped it back to the agent to change flight date.
Of course they lost it completely... I lost 5 days and finally bought a new ticket, losing another $1000. I dont know how do they do it in Nicaragua, but it is the worst experience I ever had with mail,worse than anything I saw in Moldova.
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