Customer Service at Toshiba

How disappointing that I already gave my “Customer Failures and Complaints” lecture this semester. Obviously there are always thousands of examples of BAD customer service. There are complete websites devoted to customers who want to gripe about epic failures.  I consider that lecture to be a rare opportunity for students and their professor to share their most frustrating consumer experiences.  After all, research tells us that the vast majority of customers never complain directly to the company and other research suggests that complaining and venting can be good for the soul.  Why not have a day when I can share with my nearly 200 students about how the local spa charged me full price for an appointment I tried to cancel?  I figure in the next several years I’ll blow the lid off of the old saying “a dissatisfied customer tells at least 10 people.”

But I would have also enjoyed the opportunity to tell the students what happened with Toshiba this week.  Toshiba’s handling of a service failure has likely made me a lifetime customer.  After my laptop was recalled by federal mandate, and after an attempt to update the system for the recall, the thing just died.  Kaput.  Like a door nail.  We send it back and wait…and wait…and wait.  Months later I get a call that I should call their order desk.  I’m pessimistic that I will ever see the computer or my money ever again.  I was right.

Instead of my low end, relatively inexpensive laptop, they replaced it with a laptop worth about 3X the original cost of my other laptop.  And I’m thrilled not only to have a new laptop but to experience “customer delight” as it’s called in research.  I can’t wait to share with my students a story about successful recovery!