Monday, June 14, 2010

Awesome customer service via Twitter!

1. In the library, I see a sign showing their renovation plans. On the sign is a post-it saying "Do not photograph." That's weird! I have no interest in photographing the sign, but it's odd that I wouldn't be allowed to photograph something prominently displayed in public space. So I ask the guy checking out my books why, but he didn't know. We had a bit of fun theorizing and laughed at the absurdity of the whole situation, and I left plotting a nefarious scheme to make a big show of photographing the thing just so someone would stop me.

Catching up on my tweets that day, I decided to tweet @TorontoPublicLibrary and ask them about the sign. It looked more like a promotional account than a question-answering account, but it's worth a try. After all, that's what Twitter is for! So I was pleasantly surprised to see that one Toronto Library person responded promptly and copied the tweet to another person who was able to answer my question!

It was a silly and inconsequential question, but they nevertheless took the time to answer it. Which, in a weird sort of way, is totally fulfilling the library's mandate.

2. I read an article that suggested that TFSAs don't work precisely how I thought they worked, and there might be financial penalties involved. I'm not super good at money stuff, but from where I'm sitting it looked like that sort of thing could be avoided with failsafes in the computer system. You know how if you enter the wrong number of digits in a "phone number" field on an electronic form, it simply won't let you proceed? They should be able to do the same thing with if you put too much money in your TFSA.

My TFSAs are with ING Direct, so I went to ING's website to see if they had a suggestion box. I couldn't find anything that quite looked appropriate, but I noticed they had a Twitter account. I clicked on that and it really looked more promotional than anything else, but I noticed they retweeted an account called @CEO-INGDIRECT. Meh, what the hell, that's what Twitter's for! So I tweeted him, and got an answer back within an hour - on a Saturday!

I chose ING in the first place because they seemed easy and straightforward. I could figure out how to do what I have to do, and didn't feel like there was a secret extra layer of stuff I don't understand lurking underneath. So I'm very gratified not only that they already have a mechanism to protect me from messing up my TFSA, but also that the CEO will take a moment out of his Saturday to reassure me that safe.

4 comments:

laura k said...

I have banked with ING for about 10 years, first in the US and now in Canada. Their customer service is always perfect. Generally I don't need customer service because their website is so user-friendly, but when I have had questions, I get a correct and friendly response almost instantly. They are great.

laura k said...

And may I add that I expect as much from librarians and I'm glad you had that library-positive experience.

impudent strumpet said...

I should add that I've never had a non-positive library experience. I just wasn't entirely expecting it to actually work when I tweeted a promotional account with a petty question to which they probably didn't have an immediate answer.

impudent strumpet said...

(Maybe I should amend that to I've never had a negative library experience, because I wouldn't characterize the annoyances of academic librarians and teacher-librarians as positive. But I've never had a non-positive experience with the Toronto Public Library.)