M3 Sweatt

Our second Xbox 360 is going in for repairs… nearly a month after the last one. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record.

As noted in my post late last night, our family Xbox 360 went south… officially, the video output no longer, well, outputs.

Bad news is that as my currently video-less Xbox 360 does not display the three flashing lights and will will be covered under the original one year warranty… John, the customer service agent on the other end of the phone, informed me that, of course, it’s a month out of warranty.

So the repair will cost $99, for which I will also get an extended warranty.

Perhaps these units will cross in the UPS truck.

Good news is that the Xbox virtual customer service agent, Max, informed me at the top of the call that the Xbox 360 I returned following a Friday the 13th failure repair “has been completed and shipped within 5 business days.”

Better news: the kids used some of their savings to get a Nintendo Wii, so they don’t go into video game withdrawal. They are now hooked on Wii Sports (which gives them the same level of evening workout as Dance Dance Revolution). I recommend the very convenient and well-priced WiiPlay bundle which includes a bundled wireless controller and a new disc with nine new games.

Tags: Xbox 360, customer support.

Here’s an interesting new blog: The Perfect Customer Experience, by Dale Wolf of The Cx Institute, a publishing and consulting firm. It’s for “marketing leadership for those with courage to change the customer experience.”

OK, let’s give it a whirl.

I enjoyed walking through a number of posts, including several on good and bad customer experiences and changing the conversation with the customer. Today they also have a link to a new Frost & Sullivan Whitepaper: Hosted Contact Center Industry. The report includes an analysis on the costs of hosted vs. on-site centres.

And there’s this post of interest one on how “Corporate Gobbledygook Kills the Customer Experience Before it Even Begins.”

“David Meerman Scott, a friend of mine and a top-notch communications consultant and author of three books, has really put marketers and marketing writers on the spot. He did it in an article he wrote for Cincom’s Expert Access newsletter. Let me give you a taste of Scott’s challenge, which by the way, is backed by considerable research he did in preparing the article.

“David writes:

“Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well-positioned company! Ugh. I think I’m gonna puke! Just like with a teenager’s use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in websites and news releases so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people’s, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don’t communicate very well, you know?

“Then he cites his research into corporate gobbledygook. The words that came out of his research might surprise you. Hopefully you have not been using any of them. Once you read David’s article, you will place a lot more value on plain English that is centered around solving customer problems rather than your “next generation” product … Oh, I did not mean to let that word slip into my text. Shame on you, Dale!”

Can you say “buzzword bingo”? 😉

Of interest from the blog are links to a few white papers:

• The Unified Agent Desktop Provides Single View of Customer
• IBM / Turning Shoppers into Advocates
• Insight Analytics / Sykes
• The Science of Customer Service
• The Revolution Your Customers Want
• Customer Satisfaction Through Interactive Communications / Cincom Document Solutions
• The Hosted Contact Center: On Demand Model
• Customer Experience happens in the Contact Center

Tags: Loyalty, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Service. t