Great Customer Service? No way Parks! - Just use "customer service triage.

I know it is hard to believe, but overall I experienced great customer service while I was shopping the past several weeks. To top it off I did business with a wireless phone company and frankly they did an awesome job.

It was time for a new phone which means find the phone you want then hope like hell the company you want to be with has that phone. So I started with the company I am with (name withheld to protect the pathetic), I put them last on the list. I am in the corporate store a bunch and after 4+ years of new phones, and options changes you would think they would know my face if not my name. So I walk in and if they did know me you could not tell it from their complete indifference to my arrival.

So I went to the rest and for the most part it was "ok" but two were just outstanding.

Both of them were in the Summit Mall in Akron, Ohio and they are the Verizon kiosk and the Sprint kiosk.

To my surprise I was greeting by well dressed, polite, calm, knowledgeable, salespeople and neither one of them "tried" to sell me anything. They both began the process by asking me questions as to how I use my phone and what would help me and what would not.

At times they got a little too technology wordy but they both saw my eyes begin to glaze over and recognized openly this information was not really helpful to my selection and moved on to more mundane but useful bits of information.

When I told them I needed to look at other devices and plans they both gave me their business cards, wished me well and invited me back if I had questions even if I ended up buying from someone else.

Uh, what did you just say?

"Sure Mr. Parks, feel free to drop by with any questions you might have and I will do my best to help you, happy holidays."

Talk about building good will, and showing confidence in your company, product and service.

I ended up with Verizon but the choice was not easy.

When they went to migrate the information from our old phones to the new ones my wife's would not migrate over. It is old and tired the contacts are messed up and would not work very well (explaining why it would only charge about 10% of the time we hooked it up).

I am so sorry Mrs. Parks, please stop by the Fairlawn, Ohio store, the tech's there are really good and have more ability to deal with this than we do here.

So the day after Christmas, when the place was a complete mad house I walked in prepared for a 30 to 50 minute wait for a 2 minute procedure.

I was met at the door by a young lady who smiled, looked me in the eye and said, "welcome to Verizon how can I help you?"

I told her what I needed and she said, "oh that is easy just a minute." Soon a man appeared, asked what I needed, took my phones and reappeared 2 minutes later and said, "here you go have a nice day."

What I just experienced was customer service triage. A simple process that for some reason is completely overlooked by so many companies.

So my thanks to the team at both the Summit Mall kiosk and the Fairlawn, Ohio Verizon store and to Dillion at the Sprint kiosk at the Summit Mall, you did not get the sale but you are good at your job!

Good customer service with a wireless company, you've got 2 be kidding me!