Best and worst customer service?

[VitaminX]

I'm curious who of you had some good, or bad, experience with customer support! Neopets does not count

I'll start.

Best:

I e-mailed a company who developped a game I LOVE, but only sell their merchandise in the US, and it's a shame cause I loved it, but ordering would cost me tons thanks to shipping. Got a really friendly reply, and within 2 weeks I received 2 boxes full of merchandise. Posters, plushies, bags, anything they had really.
Total retail value was close to $800. I was shocked. And no, didn't sell it, still have everything. Never meant to get this, but it sure made me love the company and game even more.

Worst:

Xbox support. I contacted them cause I had a broken controller, only 4 months old and I had to return it. Alright, got a sticker, sent it back, never arrived so they say. All I got was ''we don't have it, you can't prove it, good luck.''. So after a few weeks of back and forth with them, I just gave up. Not worth the money to put so much time in it.

And what annoys me is their chat support being too friendly. ''Wow, cool name/username!!!'' ''We should game together sometime!!'' dude, stfu, help me.

[Isca]

These stories are always fun.

My best customer service experience was at a Dunkin' Donuts, surprisingly enough (which is a coffee/breakfast food shop for those of you that don't live in areas with Dunks).
It was a really small gesture, but I ordered two breakfast wraps and then left with them. I was waiting down the street for my bus, and a Dunkin Donuts worker comes running down to me and gives me a new bag. She said that the wraps she gave me were kind of burnt and she felt bad, so she made me two more and ran after me to give them to me, when she could have just let me leave with less-than-appealing wraps. Maybe my expectations are low, but it was a really sweet gesture and every time I go into that Dunks now, I end up chatting with her for a few minutes.

My worst.. huh, assuming that my college's financial aid office doesn't count (because those are the worst kinds of people to deal with), I'd probably have to say that my worst was at a local restaurant (I've never really had any great/terrible customer service experiences outside of food lol). My friends and I were waiting at a table for twenty minutes while people around us were getting drinks and food, and we're patient enough, but no one had even come over to give us menus yet. So there's a group of us hungry college kids, waiting eagerly for a waitress and trying our hardest to be patient. Eventually I got up and told the guy up front (host, I think) that we'd been sitting there for a while without a waitress and he looks me dead in the eyes and go - "So what do you want me to do?" Needless to say, we all got up and left, and never went back to that restaurant.

*Edit* - Just realized your first post said customer support.. I hope food service experiences still count.

[Carnage]

Some of my best customer support has come from private proxy/VPN services I've purchased.

The worst customer support I've ever experienced was when I bought a motherboard on a distributor site a couple years ago. The motherboard itself clearly came DoA and didn't even boot to BIOS from the first use. After fighting with the company to RMA it back and literally having to dig through the trash to find a ridiculous item number which they apparently provided, they tried to tell me I never actually bought this item there and that I wouldn't be able to send it back. I called a few more times within a month or so period (it was a $150 mobo. I mean.. come on..) and finally got to talk to someone who actually spoke a lick of English. They proceeded to tell me the model of that mobo was discontinued from their distribution inventory and that they were no longer accepting RMA's. Thankfully, I provided all of this information to paypal (including chat logs, credit card statement, other proof of purchase) and won the settlement. Decided I would use the mobo as a target for my compound bow.
TLDR;
Bought from a shitty 3rd-party distributor. Got boned in the ass. Won the paypal dispute and shot the fuck out of the product to prove my manliness.

[VitaminX]

These stories are always fun.

*Edit* - Just realized your first post said customer support.. I hope food service experiences still count.

Well, their service was shit, saying the ''wtf can I do'', so yeah, it counts for me

And @(you need an account to see links), jup. That I can relate with as well. Steelseries asked me to cut the wires of my headset, to prove it was really broken lolol. Tech sites and their returns..

[Mama Bear]

My worst is a computer parts supply chain here in Australia, Umart. My partner at I had ordered through them to build his new PC, and one part konked within 2 weeks. We were asked to bring the machine in, told we'd have it back that same afternoon. This was not the case, and despite needing files from it for his work, we were denied access for 3 weeks. I kept in contact to check on the progress via phone, and each time I called spoke to a different rude male. They asked me if my partner was available to speak to instead, fully admitting they'd prefer to speak to a man about computers because women just "don't understand computer talk" and are "unreasonable". Clearly being told same-day service and being annoyed at getting strung along for weeks is a very unreasonable thing. Clearly a man wouldn't have been pissed off by it.

Disgusted by the way I was treated, I sent through an email complaint to the owner of the chain. I explained not only how they had gone back on the promises made about delivery time, but the chauvanistic treatment I had received on the phone. The email back reflected the comments made by the guys on the phone, including blaming my "hysteria" for any perceived rudeness on their part. Apparently they perceive speaking firmly and assertively, and not taking shit, makes me a hysterical woman.

I certainly don't expect any special treatment for being a female gamer, but respect and getting what I've paid for should be givens for any customer.

TLDR: Computer company fuck up, then treat me like a second class citizen because I have boobs.

[Kristin]

Some of my best customer support experiences have been with Paypal. They are ALWAYS awesome when I call them.

I've had numerous bad experiences with various companies but I have to say that the worst is usually at GameStop. I ordered a brand new PS4 last spring from their website and when it arrived it looked like it had been stepped on and didn't even turn on. I would even venture to guess that it was a refurb, not new. When I took it to the store to get a new one I was absolutely livid, but still very nice. Our GameStop employees are infamously sexist neckbeards and always treat me like shit when I shop there. After over an hour, they finally shipped me a new one. No compensation, no apologies.

Part of my current job is customer support/service and I'm always nice. But let me tell you, if someone is nice to me I will bend over backwards to help them and even get them free stuff. If someone is mean to me I do the absolute minimum. Always be nice to customer service people

[VitaminX]

Always be nice to customer service people

Very true!

Though, what I notice already, that having boobs doesn't help from time to time.
Or it's just coincidence with the 2 posts above me, but I doubt it.
Didn't think it would still be a big deal today (females and games/pc's etc) but it looks like there is.

I don't get it though, b00bs > anything.

[boomer]

Amazon is the best! I've ordered a lot of things, but the few times my order never made it for whatever reason it took me all of 5 minutes to get a refund or replacement. I'm actually willing to pay a little more for the same item from Amazon than from another website, partly because of shipping and partly because I know they'll take care of things.

The worst is Lenovo. 2 laptops from them both went to shit due to hardware issues, one was even before warranty was up but I guess it didn't cover that specific problem, and one time I called and I could never even reach a live person. That Lenovo now lives in a dusty drawer and I have an ASUS and they are much better anyway so pfft.

[spleef35]

Best: I used to be a huge fan of Linkin Park, until they ruined their fanclub. When the membership package for the 11th year came out, I refused to buy it because the customer service in the previous year had been so terrible. Mods were harassing people, people were bullying each other. I wrote them a detailed complaint about it. They had replaced a lot of their staff, and the woman who back wrote sincerely apologized and gave me a free membership. I told my friends to complain too, and they also got free memberships

Worst (I say this counts only because it's all I can recall, and really made me feel awful for a while): I had two very long neomail conversations last year with a couple of my friends. I was sent a warning for giving my friend color advice about making a custom layout for her user lookup. Then I was sent a warning for talking to the same friend about how much I liked playing Minecraft. She was sent a warning too. We were then neomailed by TNT "reassuring" us it was just a warning, and it mentioned word for word the concerns I had said to my friend about the warnings. I stayed off neomail for a month. Then, when talking to my other friend about how we came up with our usernames, it was related to a word used in Nigerian (not inappropriate either), and in the context of the conversation, my friend had been to Nigeria. I was silenced for 24 hours. I'm sorry for being biracial TNT, I really am. I was convinced at that point that some monitoring had been going on, and that they were looking for any reason to freeze me. I hadn't logged onto the site for a little over a year, so they might have been watching the account to see if it'd hit the 18 month mark. I bought some stuff from the NC mall after I was unsilenced, and didn't use neomail for 3 months. I also didn't try to get on any high score lists or get any trophies. I even went as far as to report some creepy people on the boards. They've left me alone since then, and I won a spotlight contest, but won't specify which to protect my account. I think I'm on their good side again.

I submitted a ticket for every warning, all of which Jess responded to. And each time she accused me of trying to lead people off site. I had plenty of evidence to show otherwise, which I submitted. She and I went back and forth quite a bit. I'm shocked our argument didn't get me frozen.

[Accelerator]

Best for me: Dropbox
Worst: PayPal, and probably a loooot more I can't remember right now