Chalk up victories for the customer

Let’s call this Adventures in Customer Service.

All of us have had nightmares in that realm — long waits on the phone before talking with someone in another country about a problem they are unable to resolve — so I thought it might make sense to share a couple of more positive experiences.

One was local. The other was national — or maybe international for all I know.

Local first. About 20 years ago, we took on the project of remodeling our kitchen.

Most of that project involved new kitchen cabinets. The old ones dated to the 1960s and had looked decrepit for at least a few decades.

Working with our friend Mark Goldman, we installed Jay County-made Pennville Custom Cabinetry, opting for natural finish cherry that has simply become more beautiful over the years.

There was just one problem: The wastebasket.

We’d opted for one of those designs where the wastebasket slides out of the cabinets so you don’t have to look at your trash while you have lunch. But the plastic wastebasket that was so nicely hidden away started to deteriorate.

The bottom broke. One edge of the top needed to be repaired with duct tape. And, in general, it looked pretty crappy.

At a Rotary Club picnic, sitting with Mark and his daughters Natalie and Elise, we popped a question as the girls devoured their ketchup-laden hot dogs.

The question: How do we fix this?

Connie had searched in every imaginable retail outlet and simply could not find a plastic wastebasket of the right dimensions. Then she searched online and came up empty as well.

Mark understood instantly.

“Talk to Jeff,” he said.

Jeff was Jeff Steed, another friend, who happens to work at Mark’s company.

Jeff and Mark explained that while the cherry cabinets will last a lifetime, plastic breaks down. And they were aware that the wastebasket in our kitchen was no longer manufactured.

But they had a solution. Pennville had bought up the last remaining inventory of plastic wastebaskets in our particular size.

Jeff asked me to snap a couple of pictures with my phone, and within a couple of hours he dropped off a replacement. We figure it’s good for another 20 years, and by then it won’t be our problem.

That gets an A-plus in my book when it comes to customer service.

Another A-plus goes to an unlikely recipient: Comcast.

About three weeks ago, a pop-up thunderstorm moved through our neighborhood, with lightning strikes so close that we jumped out of our skin.

They were close enough that the lightning knocked out our internet modem/router and the cable box for a TV in my study.

After an exchange of texts with the company, I was able to schedule a visit by a technician to replace both dead pieces of equipment.

There was, however, one little glitch.

The person on the other end of the text told us we’d get a notice that there would be a $70 service charge but assured us that we should ignore it because we had a service protection plan. They also indicated that our monthly bill was too high and should be re-packaged.

A couple of days later, the replacement equipment was in place and all was well.

All was well, that is, until the bill came for a $70 service charge.

“I thought there wasn’t going to be a charge,” said my always understanding wife.

Time to get back on the phone to Comcast.

And then things started getting interesting.

The first guy I dealt with, Nick, was a nightmare. He’d never heard of a service protection plan. The $70 charge would stay, he said. And who told you that your bill was too high? He wondered.

When I told him that information had come from tech support, he was livid.

A few minutes later, he had tech support on the phone. Nick in billing thought he could go up against the techies.

He thought wrong.

Suddenly I found myself on a three-way conversation involving two Comcast/Xfinity personnel and me. Actually, most of the time I was simply a witness to their conversation.

And it was heated.

Nick wanted to stick us with the $70 charge. Darius knew we didn’t owe it. And I was on the sideline listening in as they argued back and forth.

Finally, Darius told Nick to hang up and go away.

Within minutes, he’d erased the service charge and within a few minutes more he’d repackaged our bill so that our monthly cost took a nice drop.

In other words, customer service happened the way it’s supposed to happen, the same way it happened with Pennville Custom Cabinetry.

OK, so a new plastic wastebasket and a revised cable bill may not amount to much, but I chalked them both up as victories.

And these days we need all the little victories we can get.