Cross-shipping
At Sewell we have a pretty cool program in place where we reward marketing employees with incentives when they hit predefined financial goals. For instance one of the first incentives for new marketers is the promise of a dual-monitor setup that allows them to be more productive (and, of course, show off how valuable they are to the company).
Judging from Towering Intellect’s recent post dealing with multiple monitors we have definitely created a few multi-monitor monsters. We generally purchase monitors from Dell because they are inexpensive yet pretty high-quality. Recently, however, one of Nate’s (aka Towering Intellect) monitors went bad. I tried to call Dell’s technical support and after I was “unintentionally” disconnected the second time I tried using their online chat support.
I was very impressed with their chat support and I encourage all internet retailers to consider online chat as a sales and support tool. They quickly identified the problem (which wasn’t difficult - the monitor was fried) and determined that it was still under warranty. What really impressed me is their practice of cross-shipping.
I assumed that I would have to send back the old monitor and wait for them to test it before they would send me a replacement - that is, after all, what most internet retailers do. Instead they went ahead and shipped me a replacement and gave me two weeks to ship back the bad monitor before they would charge my card for it.
The new monitor arrived with a shipping box for the dead one. Somehow we forgot to ship back the old monitor, but I was really impressed that Dell sent me an automated email after a week reminding me to return the old monitor or our card would be charged - we promptly threw the old monitor in the mail and avoided being charged for the old one.
As far as customer service goes I was blown away - Dell minimized Nate’s frustration of being without a second monitor by shipping his replacement right away and ensured that we couldn’t take advantage of them by holding on to both monitors - we are now exploring the possibility of implementing our own cross-shipping policy - thanks, Dell.
1 Comment »
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos
I dig the cross-shipping method. I once had to replace my palm pilot like 8 times, and they did cross-shipments with me. It was a lifesaver and helped me get my issue resolved quickly.
Comment by Sam — March 14, 2006 @ 2:19 am