The Global Association for Contact Center Best Practices & Networking

I would like to relay the most positive customer service experience that I had in the most unlikely spot.

I was trying to use my Aeroplan points with AirCanada to book two tickets to the UK for my daughter and her boyfriend. I had been told that the likelihood of being able to book tickets was nil, and getting them for the price I wanted was going to be impossible.

I phoned and explained to the agent what I was looking to do, and not only did she tell me that she would be able to make it happen for me but she went through a long list describing when the best season it would be to go and what flights would be available making sure they got the maximum time over a couple of weekends. It was just an unbelievable experience.

So not only is my daughter getting to go to England during the best season, she's got great tickets and she's got extra time because we arranged it over a couple of weekends. I had an unbelievable experience in a situation where I had zero expectations.

Paul Bertin - CEO, Genticity

My good customer service story has to do with Nordstrom (the catalogue). My story is that I had purchased a jacket for my son at a different department store and I go it home and realized that there was a button missing. It was a designer jacket so I couldn't just replace it with just any other button. So I went back to the department store and there were no more jackets left. So I searched and searched and couldn't find the button. I actually called Nordstrom; the catalogue (hoping that they could put me in touch with an alteration department). The young lady on the phone took all my information, and noted exactly specifically what I was looking for, even though I didn't buy the jacket from them. She let me know that they would call me back if they could help me out.

I didn't really expect a call back, but in about ten minutes I got a call back and the lady said "Mrs. Reynolds we have found you a button." She had actually taken it upon herself to locate a store and locate a jacket within a department. They were willing to cut off the button and they wanted to know whether to send it to my home address or my work address.

So that to me was a great customer service, both in terms of the whole Nordstrom experience. It's also an excellent individual story of someone taking the initiative and going above and beyond the call of duty to create an absolutely 100% lifetime loyal customer.

Penny Reynolds - Co-Founder and Senior Partner, The Call Center School

This is a retail banking, or mortgage situation. In the course of buying a home sometimes you must produce documents that your bank has, that you may not save. I was required to provide some past bank records. As I moved around the country I retained them as my bank even though they may not have been locally where I was, just because I always had really good service with them. This is somewhat contrary to that. I picked up the phone to call them and get some of these records. The first frustrating part is that it took about five minutes to navigate through an IVR system that didn't seem to be very well programmed to get me where I wanted to get.

Since I travel so much because I am the founder of a small company, I run a lot of things on my credit card, and as a result I buy a lot of things on my credit card in a lot of cities in a short amount of time. Once I got home from another on of these six cities in five day trips my phone rings, so I pick it up and there is the normal wait which means it's a dialer reaching out to me. Instead of getting a person I got an automated voice prompt asking whether a certain number of purchases were made by me. I was taken back because these automated phone calls can be really annoying but this actually became a service to me. It made it easy for me to see city by city and day by day whether it was legitimate and they were. I thought that was a really great service. They didn't stop my card. They didn't at the point of purchase cause me a time delay.

They have this really efficient for them and convenient for me way of testing whether my card had been stolen from the same company a few weeks later I got this wonderful annual statement that summarized all of my purchases by category and I hadn't requested it and I didn't pay for it. It was a very pleasant surprise and now I am a very loyal customer of that card. It is a First USA now Bank One VISA card, United Airlines.

Mark Selcow - President & Co-Founder, Merced Systems