The Best Way to Win a Customer
How AWS won me over in 43 minutes
This is a story about fantastic customer service. I’m writing it on the Shortline bus, which features a soul-sucking level of horrific customer service.
About a year ago I signed up for AWS’s free tier. I played around with the service, created a simple app or two…and didn’t do much more with it. Lately I’ve been working with Heroku (an AWS competitor), and didn’t really think about using AWS. Then I got a bill last night for the first month of paid service beyond the free tier.
My apps were not being used/accessed, and I dreaded the idea of crawling through an ostensibly complex support system and argue my case. So of course, the first thing I did as a plugged-in millennial was to tweet about it.
I figured nothing would come of it, and I would go through their support system in the morning.
43 minutes later, I get an email from Grant W.
Hi Feifan,
We are writing to reach out to you regarding your recent tweet. I’m very sorry for the unexpected charge … As a courtesy, I have refunded the bill for March…and issued an EC2 credit so that you will not be billed for charges in April. The refunded charge will appear in your account in 3-5 days. Again, I apologize for the surprise charge. I hope that you will continue to use our services. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns regarding your account.
Best regards,
Grant W.
Amazon Web Services
Amazon did four great things:
- They monitor their Twitter support account
- They took the effort to look up my account through my Twitter
- They looked through my billing history and issued a refund right then and there
- They applied a credit for the next billing period, giving me time to shut things down and avoid the next bill
With that, they saved me the time and brain damage that going through support could entail. This simple gesture was all it took to win me over as a future customer.
The key to winning customers: Your product/service should improve my life and add more value than the amount I spent + the value of my time.
And to top it off, they replied on Twitter to make sure I got the message.
@FeifanZ is Cofounder + CEO @Tunetap, which helps musicians and venues presell tickets to create concerts without the risk of losing money on production costs. Feifan is also a student @Cornell University.
