Thursday, August 7th, 2008
So I chose a Vaio over a Dell a few months back and was suitably impressed with Sony’s excellent customer service.
Recently, my laptop crashed so I had to bring it in to the customer service centre at Wisma Atria. All was good, they told me they’d take my laptop for a week and give me a call. That was on Monday.
Fastforward to Wednesday, I got two missed calls from an unknown number and a third call within an hour. I was all ready for it to be some telemarketer but was pleasantly surprised to find it was Sony. Persistent customer care. It would’ve been so easy for the customer support guy to just hang up and call again tomorrow, after all, they did say a week. But there was effort made to get me on the phone once the job was done.
So after I got on the phone, I was told my hard disk crashed. I told the representative I was greatly disturbed that I had just bought it a couple of months ago and it had already crashed. To this I was given assurance that anomalies happen and he gave me a few tips to take care of my hard drive when I got it back.
Finally, I got the pick up details and needless to say, I was thrilled to get it two days ahead of schedule, and more importantly, Sony continues to impress me with their customer service. If it was just once when I was buying the laptop, I could write it off to a salesman trying to close a deal. But it has been consistent across multiple touchpoints with pre-sale, post-sale, warranty people, the person who helped me deal with my laptop and the tech support guy who called me after to explain the problem.
Normally, if a laptop died on me within three months of purchase, I’d be furious. But through Sony’s customer service and expectation management, it’s turned into an positive advocacy piece on my blog. Well done, Sony.
Tags: excellent customer service, laptop customer service, sony customer service
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Thursday, June 12th, 2008
When I was contemplating a new laptop, it was between Dell and Sony. After Dell failed the customer service test (for now), Sony was next. I’ve had my laptop for just over two weeks and have had experiences with their service reps pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase, and it’s been pretty consistent. Consistently good, that is.
Pre-purchase I gave them a call to ask some questions about their extended warranty programme and the lady on the phone was pretty helpful, even if she had to ask somebody else for details a few times. When I went down to purchase the laptop, the salesperson, Johnny Guo, approached me to help very quickly. The laptop came with a free RAM upgrade and I love using technology, but that doesn’t mean I know how to set it up. So he was happy to help me with it, and spent the next 40 minutes setting up my laptop for it’s first run as well as answering a constant barrage of questions from me. Look for this dude if you want to buy anything from Sony at the Wisma Atria shop.
After that I had some problems with registering my online warranty and sent an email which was replied within a couple of hours by Nelson, who helped me very quickly and efficiently. The warranty was probably my fault (I couldn’t recall what the ID was) but he helped me fix it anyway without me feeling like an idiot.
(Sidetrack: Sony was offering a free two year warranty if you register it online, it’s a great way for them to build up a database with useful information like email and demographics at the cost of two years warranty.)
All in all this experience has been really good for me. I don’t know whether it’s a conscious initiative on Sony’s part or if I had the good fortune of interacting with great employees, but it’s left a lasting impression on me and one I hope is not tainted in the future.
The interesting thing is this. Sony has no snazzy “customer chat” that Dell has, but does the basic things right and portrays a consistent image across functions (at least those that I’ve interacted with), but it’s serving them better than it is Dell, at least in Asia.
Tags: buying a sony laptop, customer service, dell customer service, sony customer service, sony in singapore
Posted in Singapore | 3 Comments »
