Promise the moon, and don’t even deliver Earth orbit?
I bought my Lenovo X200 tablet 3 months ago, and I absolutely love it to death, I love the design and the superb presale customer service and everything, until I got one key on my keyboard broken and requested for warranty service… This is what they told me after 3 weeks communicating back and forth to customer support reps:
Regret to inform you, for this case, management is unable to honour you for the keyboard part replacement.
It is due the requerst does not meet the replacement policy & criteria.
It is an industrial practice that machine which had physical impact does covered in warranty.
Again apologise, as I’m not be able to proceed to absorb the cost, as the request has been declined by the Management.
I appreciate for your co operation and kind patience.
I hope that our future service opportunities result in nothing less than your complete satisfaction.
Future service opportunities my a**, how do you expect me to ever buy any thing from you again when you can’t go an extra mile and help a customer who paid 1600usd for your product, just to replace a single KEY on his laptop? You can surely expect him to spread this to each and everyone he knows, and he is doing exactly just that.
Well, enough about Lenovo, I don’t even care about them anymore. But what is the moral of this story? The one single thing that my professor stresses over and over again is:
- Promise the min (under promise)
- Deliver the max (over deliver)
Okie, I hear some of you yelling Noooo. What if Mr Client has a few fleeting thoughts; did this mean it wasn’t such a complicated project as you’d said? Perhaps you’ve over charged him?
Such concern is valid, I myself always give the exact estimation (while of course giving myself a little extra time in case some extra works required, and happens 99% of the time), yet the customers always expect more from the products they pay for (hey, we never learn that we get what we pay for). During my course of doing business, I have learned that there are 2 types of customers:
- Those that always ask more for less(I stay away from these people)
- Those that are willing to give more if they find that my service is worth the extra cost (these are my long time clients, or as I prefer to call them, partners).
I believe that, while you don’t have to always “under promise & over deliver”, you must be willing to go the extra mile to help your clients unless your service is a one time service (cemetery realtor perhaps? But I thought you would want to sell to the guy’s widow as well?). I could have purchased more Lenovo, hey I love the product and I change laptop every 2-3 years, how much money would they have made from me over the course my life? How many referred clients would they have got from me? No, they refuse to see that future benefits. If you set your sight too short, you will be the next Lenovo, and that s****. Trust me, nothing is more difficult that trying to repair a damaged reputation.
Have any experience about worst/bad/good/excellent customer service you want to share? Please let us know.
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Sorry we disappointed you. Please email contact info me at david AT churbuck.com and I’ll get you taken care of.
David Churbuck
VP Global Web Marketing
Lenovo
Hi David,
Thanks for taking the time to read my complaint the previous day, and sorry for getting back a little late. Regarding the warranty service, I honestly don’t care about it anymore, I got the new keyboard coming anyway and I’m happy (and the cost is quite cheap, frankly), but I sent you an email anyway.
I just had a very very bad experience with lenovo. Mind you, I am an IBM employee and have bought several IBM laptops for myself and family members.
Recently, I bought a lenovo laptop for a family member, the X series tablet, it cost me about 1700USD. Well, I wasn’t aware I needed to purchase a separate CD rom drive. I worked with a sales rep and he never mentioned that it was needed. 1 week after i place my order, the laptop arrives without a CD drive. I called lenovo & I tried to get in touch with the sales rep who handled my previous purchase. He never returned my call. So another sales rep helped me on the phone and told me to buy a base for the laptop. So I made that purchase. 1 week later I received the the base and it had an empty CD slot. I called again and I was told, that I had to buy the CD drive separately. At this point I am furious. Why couldn’t any of the previous sales rep communicate that to me clearly the first time? So the third sales rep tells me he would work on resolving my problem with a supervisor and said he would call me back. He never called back. So today I called again to speak to a sales rep, who proposed a solution that was different from what the other sales rep told me yesterday. At this point I am not confident that any of the reps really know what they are talking about. The reps think i am just trying to avoid paying for another CD drive. Quite silly, since I have already paid quite a bit of money for a laptop that I cannot use. They fail to realize the inconvenience that their incompetent staff have caused me. This morning sales rep referred to my problem as human error. so basically i should deal with it. I called back to get an email address to lodge a complain to upper management and got a general websales email address. I am very disappointed. I am looking into how I can get the appropriate IBM folks aware of this. Right now I am thinking of returning the laptop & the base and buying another brand. This is really my last time buying any lenovo product. And I am going to make other people aware of this. If you cannot go the extra mile to make your customer’s buying experience a good one, then you really don’t need their business. I would go elsewhere to find another latop.
Well, I can totally see myself in your story. FYI, the sale reps I mentioned in the post never got back to me via email or phone. And Churbuck who commented above is supposed to be someone high ranked in Lenovo, I emailed him my feedback and never got a response even just to say thanks for the feedback. I guess next time I buy a new laptop, I know who to avoid: Dell and Lenovo.
In any case, you may want to email him using the email address above.