It’s fairly unusual living in Britain to receive good, let alone great, customer service from a call centre. Recently lots of large service based companies have been moving call centres to remote parts of the world in an attempt to cut costs and increase profits, not really thinking too much about the customer experience. HSBC and Midland Mainline (a railway operator) are great examples of this and I’m frequently frustrated when I’m trying to book a train journey with someone who barely speaks English.

Such is the state of British call centres that I feel it is entirely necessary to report two cases of excellent customer service I received just this week.

Microsoft adCenter

I run a handful of Payperclick campaigns for my clients, one of whom was recently sent a £50 voucher from their host to spend with adCenter. Unfortunately this was only for new customers and not those with existing accounts. I called the adCenter helpline and the gentleman on the other end was fantastic. He listened to what I wanted to achieve, talked me through how to set it up and even emailed me the next day to make sure everything was OK.

Now that is fantastic service. Compare that to working with Google AdWords where there isn’t even a help line phone number to call in the first place. Well done Microsoft and come on Google pull your socks up, you’re making enough money to look after your customers properly.

The AA & Royal & Sun Alliance

I recently had my bicycle stolen (again) from outside my apartment in South West London. The process of speaking to the two companies that I buy insurance from (the AA and R&SA) has been incredibly straight forward. The call centre staff were helpful and even compassionate - it felt like I’d lost a dear member of my family, not a push bike. When it was necessary for them to take my query offline, they did so and called back within the 30 minutes as promised.

Excellent service and a big MacDonald’s style gold star to you both.

Of course, good customer service is essential and should play a big part in your online or offline marketing strategy. Even if you want to sell information products or small web scripts / plugins, think about how you will manage customers after the sale. What if they need support or a refund should your product not be what they wanted, or if they can’t get it to work.

If you need an incentive as to why you should consider after sales service, remember it’s ten times* more expensive to sell to a new customer than one who has already bought from you.

* OK so I can’t back that statistic up with hard evidence but I’ve heard it quoted many times and also it’s fairly logical.

If you want more advice on how to build customer relations I suggest you head over to Return Customer where you’ll find some interesting ideas - particularly the post on the ethical obligations of customer care.