a byte of me

Its very rare that one comes across good customer service. And even rarer to come across it consistently. And hence I believe it deserves a blog post of its own. Most of my experiences calling customer service numbers of big companies have ranged from being "okay, but nothing great" to "exceptionally horrible". (Here, I feel obligated to mention that I consider Sprint Wireless's customer service to be worse than exceptionally horrible).

However over the past few days I have had the best customer service experience of my life. I am still a 5/3 bank customer. 5/3 bank is primarily a Mid-west bank (probably just Ohio). I have a few accounts with them, including a loan and I havent bothered to move those to a local bank after I moved to Utah (because I just didnt wanna go through the hassle, really). Actually, on a side note, I must mention that once I looked up their bank location locator service on 5/3 website to see if any locations existed in Utah. The search returned with the message "No location found in a 1000 miles". Ha ha! Its too cool!

But, coming back to the main point, I have had some things to take care of and over the last 5 days or so I have had to call in three or four times to their customer service. And every single time I had an amazing experience. Firstly, I was connected to a real live speaking person within a minute of calling. I never had to hold longer. Secondly, the customer service didnt keep redirecting me to diffferent departments - a single person took care of multiple things that belonged to different departments herself. Other companies would have redirected me to the departments (and there would have been a few dropped calls during redirection etc.... who knows). But this was cool. And every single time I interacted with someone, they exactly understood what I wanted and took care of it within minutes. Today, I called in with two or three different things, that were really complicated too (I cant reveal much details, although I wish I could, but I'd rather keep my financial information to myself) - and the whole process was over in less than 10 minutes! I kept looking at my cell phone in disbelief that it was showing the total call time as 8 mins 34 seconds. If it were Dell or Sprint or something, I'd still be holding on the phone, waiting to speak to someone! This is amazing! I think, maybe, I should write to them and appreciate their efforts.