As you may recall, I had my share of problems with my last laptop, which culminated in a bad customer service experience. I was sufficiently incensed to blog (see vent) about it here.

What happened next made me stay with Lenovo instead of switching to a Mac. First off, Mark from Lenovo posted a comment on my blog, asking me to contact him. He apologized for the bad experiences I had and scheduled for a technician to come to my house to fix my problem. When I had additional problems with my computer he jumped through hoops to get it fixed. At the end he send me a brand new computer – extending the next business day on-site warranty beyond what I had purchased.

So what happened that made me regain the trust in the company:

• Timely response to my problem with a genuine “I feel your pain” attitude
• No corporate speak – honest and transparent conversation to resolve my issues
• Wow me through customer service by doing unexpected things – in this case send me a newer and better computer without me asking for it.

At the end of the day, most customers know that products cannot be flawless. If they do end up with a lemon, their tolerance to work through the issue with the vendor is usually large – after all they bought the product because they have a certain affinity for the product and/or the company and so their default attitude towards that company is usually positive.

Unfortunately you can squander all that positive social capital in minutes by having a customer service rep with a bad hair day becoming combative with a customer calling to resolve an issue. That too will happen – especially in large companies.

The key is to minimize this negative people-effect by hiring the right people and by building a no-excuse customer-centric culture – much like what Zappos.com has been able to achieve. The other key is to have a swat team of people on staff who can jump in when the inevitable will happen – a complete system breakdown. Because even when that happens, you can and should try to recover that customer.

Lenovo just did it with me…thank you Mark.

[Update 6/11/08 - I wrote the story of how Lenovo Wow'd me and turned me into a loyal customer once again here] 

After spending 7 hours diagnosing my 8 month old Lenovo T60p today, which I bought with next business day on-site service, I found out that the computer’s hard drive is busted. They are sending me a new hard drive, but the image disks needed to rebuild the hard drive will take three days. When I told the technician that they should not sell their service as a next business day service he snapped at me telling me that he was not selling anything – he was just fixing stuff over the phone.

So much for IBM service…

And this is the computer that already had its main board as well as its memory replaced (within a week or so).

In the old days they called this a lemon…

Time for Mac?

On Thursday 12/13 at 1pm EDT we will be conducting a public round table discussion with Lenovo’s VP of Online Marketing, David Churbuck, and SAP’s VP of Social Media Relations Michael Prosceno on what it takes to make all this social media and marketing 2.0 stuff to work in a large company. It should be a fun discussion and we hope you will be able to join us.

For more details and to register, visit the Facebook event’s page.