We are definitely of the school, some would call it old, that believes that good customer service is based around being able to have a conversation with someone who can help. This remains the case, but a recent experience was impressive and involved no telephone calls, no humans and absolutely no hassle. This differs from various other experiences we could point to, by clicking here, and here and here, and here,….you get the point.
BillingViews’ WordPress web site is hosted by WP Engine. WordPress is very impressive. It fast, it is secure, stable and even the, er, completely untechnical amongst the BillingViews gang can use it without breaking something.
We had to upgrade our account at WP Engine because – wonderfully – enough people are now regularly reading our articles (and we have plans to do something quite disruptive – with a sensible objective, of course) that we needed to buy more, er, stuff to let you read it.
Unfortunately, due to a breakdown in normally seamless communication between said gang, a personal credit card was used for the transaction, not a company one.
Hearts sank at the prospect of trying to find a number, a human, someone who was able to do something. Was it, in fact, even worth trying? It could be expensed, after all.
But try we did.
With a feeling that this was flying in the face of any kind of common sense, we tried clicking a chat button on the site. This immediately started a short ‘conversation’ with John. He would get Billing on the case. Ah, we thought, the old ‘transfer and lose’ ploy.
To our surprise, within minutes there was a very polite and upbeat email from George in Billing, who said reversing charges should not be a problem. Someone would get back to me.
Imagine the shock when, again within minutes, Becky emailed me from Billing, saying that if I clicked this link, uploaded the company card details, she would see to it that the personal one was credited.
This was done, and Bryan sent a quick email saying that the company card had been charged and the personal one credited. Bryan apologized because, he said, it can take up to 10 working days to credit credit cards.
It took two.
It is clear that, along with an ageing population, BillingViews has an ageing writer or two, who need to trust technology more. The experience was seamless, quick, took in multiple channels of communication in what must by now be a pretty large organization.
They deserve to be a much larger one.
These online chat services can be really powerful. Not quite talking to someone – as your chat host is probably chatting up 20 people in parallel. But I had a good experience with Microsoft (there, said it) when trying to find a license number for some century old version of Office. I had lost the old computer, lost the source CD, lost the order number, moved continent (nearly losing my dogs) and after a couple of minutes of chat time, I had a download link and the installation serial number. Great stuff. Can’t even be 100% sure it was a human on the other end – but did the trick.