Charles Schwab. Not only do their (at least checking) products have great benefits (like no ATM fees and free international transactions), but every time I've called they've been extremely helpful.
I once had my debit card canceled due to fraud while traveling internationally, and they shipped a replacement via both UPS and Fedex to ensure a replacement got to me as quickly as possible.
I have no doubt they've lost money on me as a customer in my lifetime, but I have nothing but amazing things to say about them and I suspect they'll make it up later in life when I have more assets to work with.
Came here to say Schwab as well. Caught me very pleasantly by surprise. It's easy to get a human on the phone, they are always very knowledgeable and get me answers fast. I've dealt with them on everything from bounced checks to wire transfers to self directed 401k questions, not one sub par experience.
Really... I just had the worst experience just trying to limit my sharing since my employer signed me up to a retirement account with them. No automatic prompt, had to be forwarded around and finally to a human that had to verify several things and information for me just to limit my sharing. The first call I got stuck with the phone robot and it wouldn't accept any input. The second call was 18 minutes to just get that done.
I assume you're looking for bigger companies. I've had plenty of great experiences with local companies where the person is likely the owner. And I assume you're looking for consistency too - almost every company I've had more than just a couple of interactions with has had at least one person that did their job well from a customer service standpoint.
Here are the most consistent ones though from my experience:
Chick-fil-A, especially when you go inside. And it's not just one - it's most of the ones I've visited. Every now and then you'll get an employee working the drive through that's not exactly pleasant, but still way above the average for fast food.
Publix, a regional southeastern grocery store. Every cashier is very nice and pleasant, the stores are clean and well lit, the baggers are always there to help you load up.
Amazon, the best customer service is not ever needing customer service. Any time I've had a problem it has been because I misread or misunderstood the product description, and there has never been a problem sending anything back.
Patagonia is amazing. They’ve fixed a winter jacket for me for free that had a hole melted in it from a bicycle light. The light turned itself on in my pocket and became so hot within minutes that it melted a hole. Patagonia did a top notch fix (it’s invisible), provided and prepaid label to send the jacket, paid for return shipping, and did the repair for free. Even though it was 100% not their fault. The company making the light on the other hand did nothing to help at all and refuses to add a warning in the instructions that the light gets hot enough to burn your hand or melt your jacket.
The absolute worst service and customer service I ever received in my life was Turkish airlines, by far. They kept canceling our flights, were extremely rude and unprofessional shouting at us in Turkish, giving no directions or information to the hundreds of people affected, no one spoke English, they left us stranded in the terminal, then offered the crappiest hotel I’ve had the displeasure of staying at, provided meal vouchers that weren’t accepted anywhere, lied to us all the way, had a line at the airport 3h long to talk to them, rebooked us on red eye flights without even asking, and refuses to this day to pay the compensation we’re entitled to following the cancelations. After this little adventure, i looked up reviews and it seems like this is just another day for Turkish airlines: hundreds of reviews describing what we went through. I will never set foot on a TK flight ever again and tell anyone who will listen to avoid Turkish airlines like the plague unless they like pain and arriving several days late.
I'll second Patagonia. I have a zip-up sweater of theirs that was around a decade old that still looked brand new despite wearing it at least once a week and I got the zipper stuck in something and it broke. They replaced the zipper no cost, no problems, free shipping.
> I will never set foot on a TK flight ever again and tell anyone who will listen to avoid Turkish airlines like the plague unless they like pain and arriving several days late.
How low have they fallen since their publicity department was praised by John Cleese at the 1989 Academy Awards.
They still say they’re “Europe’s #1 airline”, but look up reviews from ordinary travelers and you find hundreds of them describing a special kind of hell at IST.
> were extremely rude and unprofessional shouting at us... giving no directions or information to the hundreds of people affected... they left us stranded in the terminal
First time dealing with Turkish port authorities? They do this to their own people. Try getting a car on a boat in Alanya. You will go on a mad goose paper chase: Person A will make you wait half an hour in their queue (with mandatory coffee breaks), to then tell you that you need a paper from person B. Person B is nowhere to be found, or on their coffee break, but person C says they might be in building X. No one in building X has ever heard of person B, and who the hell are you anyway for asking, go back to the terminal. Meanwhile your car is blocking other cars from leaving the boat, and there's nothing you can do because Person D needs to see that paper before you move it. People are getting stressed. An angry traveller knows person B from the village, and goes into Building X and drags him into the street so that he can give you your damn paper, but person B doesn't know what you're talking about and sends you back to person A. Person A is pissed off, and writes something on a piece of paper, and sends you to Person C. Person C, reads the paper, writes something else on the paper, and tells you to give it to Person A. Person A reads the scrap of paper, and then writes nothing but your number plate on a square piece of paper, and tells you to give it to person D, who barely glances at it and lets you go to your car.
Moral: next time, have your number plate scrawled lazily on a postit note and wave it vaguely at the guy at the fence, like everyone else does to bypass the bureaucratic hell that is the turkish port authority.
Border police was its own kind of jerks which okay I guess, not like my expectations were very high.
But here I was talking about the TK staff. The airline “service” reps. They were the rude and unprofessional ones I’m talking about. I have yet to hear “sorry” for the 36h delay and I had the pleasure of interacting with 20–30 TK staff at the airport during this ordeal.
ZSA. (https://zsa.io) they make keyboards like the Moonlander, Ergodox EZ, and now the Voyager.
I once reported a bug in their online keyboard configurator. About an hour later I got an email from one of their developers asking me to send him a link to my config. Another hour went by and I got an email saying that he had found the bug and pushed a fix.
Later, when I had a power module failure, I emailed support for help. They asked for my address and shipped me a new keyboard. All I had to do was ship the broken one back once I was happy with the new one. Super super solid support. I’ve had the CEO email me personally too. I love small companies like ZSA.
I'm not sure what systems they have in place there. I was telling my co-founder about my experience with them just yesterday, and my experiences have taken place over about 2-3 years, but I've had no contact with them in probably 4-5 years.
Every call, the call center people were knowledgeable, friendly, helpful. It was a pleasure to call them (which is not what I expected at all).
I remember I had a call with them, and had to contact Razer directly afterwards because they shipped me 3 faulty computers (out of 4 ordered). Razer was brutal to deal with, didn't want to help, didn't care, wouldn't do anything for us.
How on earth did a public service get it so right, and a public company so wrong?
Colum means that at the for-profit company, the support people are probably given a KPI (key performance indicator) of answering X calls per hour. That rushes them so they do not really help anyone.
Some government agencies really get it right. Strange as it sounds, I've always had positive interactions with the Secret Service. I've worked events where the president spoke, and I used to live next door to an embassy, so they patrolled the block more often than the local police.
Delaware heavily depends on companies registering and paying tax there as a source of income, and have gone to great pains to remove all sources of friction in their administrative processes
Surprisingly Amazon gave me the best customer support on every instances. Most issues are just no questions asked refunds. It almost felt like they were expecting things to mess up.
Another is QuickBook(Intuit) when I wasn't even their customer, the support was utmost helpful(while they had every opportunity to tell me to take a hike and talk to my bank).
Worst support so far from insulting to mildly inconvenient in that order : eBay, Facebook, Paypal, Discord.
There are some mind blowing support from local businesses which won't be recognized, so I will not name any.
In the UK you can still get them on the phone really quickly.
I have never had any issues with their CS, I even use Amazon pay for any sites that support it because I had an issue where the shop wanted me to wait for an RMA process for a graphics card I bought which was dead on arrival. I reached out to Amazon and they refunded me the same day.
AAISP are fantastic in the UK, so many different ways to get in touch with them and first line support is knowledgeable and helpful.
Zen UK ISP is also good, as are Plusnet, both quick to answer the phone with actual useful customer support. It’s shocking just how bad the big ISPs are here too.
Synology surprised me, a fan failed on my NAS which was out of warranty, I emailed to ask for a part number and they shipped me a new fan on next day delivery for free.
Scan UK have been a real mixed bag for me, I’ve had them go above and beyond at times, but other times acted really hostile.
Olympia Express did the same thing with a part for a coffee grinder, I emailed, their ceo emailed back and sent me some parts and a bit of chitchat about coffee.
Apple replaced a motherboard in a 4 year old MacBook Pro that had died, I had no Apple care but took it to the store and they fixed it within a couple of hours for free. I dropped a phone and cracked the screen within days of buying it and they replaced that too.
I click on “request phone support” and my cell phone rings within seconds of clicking that button.
I’m like, expecting to be able to take a decent piss before anyone gets back to me, and they call me and fully handle my problem before my bladder even gets uncomfortable: Now THAT is fast!
I once asked them why they were being so agreeable with such a bizarre return issue (I had gotten a book of children’s Christian devotionals instead of some male GFCI electrical plugs), and they told me that my issue history was “clean and green”, in that it was not excessive, and every issue had been legitimate and not linked to anything untoward from my end.
I have recently (within the last 18 months) started riding a motorcycle. Motorcycle gear is hard to find at retail, which I think is pretty common with niche activities at this point. Two Internet sites (in the US at least) dominate that sector, and turns out they're both owned by the same firm: CycleGear and RevZilla.
The former DOES have retail stores, but the latter does not. The sites are now similar, but the feel is better at RevZilla, so that's MOSTLY where I search and buy. I fully expected the customer service to suck either way, though, given that they have effectively no competition.
tl;dr? I was wrong.
Last year, as it got cooler, I realized I needed a heavier moto jacket. I bought one, but the fit was wrong, and the fit was wrong in a way that made it clear that just going down a size wasn't going to solve the problem. Merlin jackets are just not shaped like Ubermonkey, turns out. I called RZ to arrange a return, and was ON THE PHONE WITH A REAL HUMAN IN LIKE 6 MINUTES.
And this real human set me up with a return label immediately, and then asked if he could help me figure out a replacement. He knew the product lines they carried, and understood the styles I wanted, and suggested a brand I didn't know but immediately clicked with. They credited me immediately for the return (before I got off the phone) so at no point was I technically paying them for two jackets, even.
I was stunned. Customer service is not dead.
(I looked it up: RevZilla was conceived in 2007 as an online provider; CycleGear has always been brick & mortar. The RZ founder and a PE group formed a holding company in 201 to own & operate both businesses separately. I suspect the fact that an RZ founder is still fundamentally in charge is why the RZ service is so good.)
Amazon.com. They've always provided excellent customer support when I've had to deal with tracking / replacing / returning items.
Costco - again, fantastic service.
A long time ago I applied to Lucasfilm for a job. I still have fond memories of how warm and kind the HR rep was while telling me that I was too junior for the role.
Every restaurant I've dined at in Los Angeles - amazing service. They treat me like a celebrity (just in case I really am).
I bought something off a third party seller on Amazon. They couldn't deliver and cancelled the order.
6 months later, I noticed I never got my money back. I jump on a support chat, and I got refunded, no questions asked.
My interaction with Amazon support has always been stellar, and refunded immediately whenever there is a problem with no fuss. Once I got a £500 monitor stolen by the driver, so the procedure was a little more complicated, but basically I had to sign a document saying I did not steal it nor lie about it, and got my money back in less than 10 days.
It feels like they always want to err on the side of the customer and that is refreshing to see.
Super nice in person, too. Worth a stop to try a bunch of instruments if you're driving through Indiana on I-90 and need a break. There's a cafeteria, too.
They have a service to order, for free - not even delivery fee, parts that you lost or broke.
A year or so ago my 6 year old son sent them a handwritten letter alongside a drawing of a castle. He was asking them to please bring back the castle theme, and if they didn't have any idea they could use his drawing for inspiration.
A few weeks later he received a response. The rep congratulated him for his drawing and told him that they used it for the set that they were just releasing - The Lion Knight Castle. The timing was excellent, but the rep was also very clever in their reply, making it very personal. You could tell someone took the time to sit down and figure out how to craft a response adequate to the original sender.
They have dirt cheap VPSs (and much more) and even if you only have a 3€/month VPS they answer your support requests near immediately. They resolved my tickets most of the time in <15 minutes, no matter what problem I had and what time it was.
Logitech used to be great. Years ago my mice broke, they asked me to destroy it and send video, and sent me replacement which arrived several days later. I think it was even out of warranty, and i just posted ticket to check if anything can be done, wasn't even asking for replacement. Hasn't paid anything, too, they covered shipping costs as well.
Sadly, nowadays their CS is shit (long waiting times and i heard that they stopped that "destruction replacements"), quality of their peripherals is shit (two logitech g502 started double clicking or de-pressing buttons after just 5 months, and that's 150$ mice! And switches in their mechanical keyboard started to die after less than a year), and logitech g hub is probably one of the worst peripheral software i ever used, on par with razer one.
I almost religiously used logitech peripherals for years. Now it's just different company.
Fastmail, always answering fast no matter the time, without any canned responses, just straight to business, without bullshit like "check your router".
Grafana, not "customer support" per se (because i'm not paying customer), but their community slack have grafana team devs who frequently answer questions and help with issues. I hit pretty specific issue in one of their products, and one of their devs (Joe Elliot, if i recall correctly) spent some significant amount of his time to help me debug and identify some issue that only, it seems, emerged in my specific install. Generally common sight in their slack, seems like they do care alot about their opensource community.
Digitec/Galaxus, a Swiss company in the likes of Amazon. Not only they offer customer support with native speakers (French/German/Italian/English), their return policy is top notch. They are not the cheapest, but they have outstanding support.
Baratza coffee grinders. They have a well-deserved reputation in the coffee community for excellent customer service. They sell replacement parts at very reasonable costs. I’ve sent them pictures of my disassembled grinder and they diagnosed and sent out parts immediately.
I wrote them a love letter a few years back after being amazed by their customer service. They asked me if they could put it on their site, not sure if they did...
Absolutely. I’ve had a very similar experience where a bunch of the paddles broke off that push the coffee into the hopper only a couple weeks after we bought it. It was completely our own fault, we had been grinding more coffee than the hopper could handle. I took the thing apart and got in touch with support and they just sent me an entirely new grinder so I didn’t wait to wait to get the one part replaced
Delta. I was having a nightmare of a travel day (not caused by the airline) and had to call to rebook my flights. The customer service rep was one of the sweetest people I've ever talked to. She rebooked my flight with no issue but she also just chatted with me about my bad day, about what I was looking forward to on my vacation, etc. I'm not normally one to talk to strangers, but this was genuinely the one bright part of that whole day.
Delta has been awesome enough I favor them for flights. Their employees at MSP saved my vacation three times. One helped us find our way around airport construction at MSP. The next helped us when Houston had some internet outage and all airlines had mile long lines to check in/bags. Finally my wife got a severe migraine and I somehow put a bag down at the gate and forgot it and an employee turned it in and I was able to just go pick it up instead of having the airport locked down or whatever happens when you lose bags in 2023.
rsync.net has been amazing. just real people, normal email, super nice. Technologically capable.
NS.nl (dutch trains) has been wonderful, too - their support chat went straight to a human who apologized for the wait saying it was a peak time. They handled my question (which wasnt even an issue, just a question) immediately and were very kind and made sure I understood. They ended the chat by telling me to please come back if I have followup questions, and wishing me a nice weekend. It was awesome.
Traders Joe. Everyone is genuinely nice, and look like they want to be there doing what they are doing. I know it’s not true but they make it look like it is.
1800 Contacts has always been really great. Got an updated prescription through their digital exam, was approved an hour later, and had my contacts recieved in the mail the next day.
Anytime I've had issues they were quickly resolved, and their chat actually connects you to a human almost instantly.
I'm a paid account holder, and I've had 2 or 3 email support requests over perhaps 10 years. Each time a person actually read my request, thought about it, and gave a useful or helpful answer. eg in one case, their employee tracked down why search wasn't working the way I thought it should, and giving me an actual fix to the issue (I had an imported inbox in a subfolder, so saying in:Inbox in search wasn't working bec there were two folders named Inbox).
100%! It's an employee-owned company that is ethical and responsive. I've been with them for years and their service is outstanding both technically and in terms of support. Vastly preferable to the UI shambles that is Gmail and every "free" alternative.
I was most surprised by Australia Post, after reporting a weird login issue during the start of Covid when everything was going to shit. It was took a couple of weeks before they got to it, but I received a couple of phone calls from the same person who genuinely wanted to help, who worked internally to identify and resolve with their tech teams.
Worst by far has been Nintendo Australia. Switch spontaneously stopped charging after being plugged in for a couple of hours. Retailer sent it to Nintendo who diagnosed internal damage to the usb port (caused by their official charger..), and they would only throw it in the bin for free or I had to pay to get the broken switch back or pay more for a refurbish. Then they lied about their complaints email and gave me their direct address. Then sent me a non functional switch back which I had the retailer replace on the spot with a brand new one (under Aus law this should have been the original solution, but my spouse had to drop it off and wasn't aware of consumer rights).
I haven't spoken to them in a couple years because I don't work for a company that uses Solidworks anymore, but Dassault Systemes had fantastic customer support (maybe it was one of their VARs, I can't remember).
I became somewhat well-known among their tech support agents for having some of the most difficult and creative problems with Solidworks. Usually some kind of "I'm trying to bend sheet metal in a way that Solidworks doesn't natively support".
They were on-the-ball about RFCs too. I submitted no less than 3 RFCs and they were all accepted in a more timely manner than I hoped for. And they weren't just little nonsense stuff, some of them dipped into nasty mathematical theory; sheet metal is apparently really difficult to calculate in certain situations.
Surprisingly, GE. Apparently they’re the only big appliance company that maintains a service division in-house. It’s easy to book a repair, the engineer arrives on time, and they were able to successfully repair my 20-year old fridge that would have entailed a complete kitchen remodel to replace.
old Amazon - Their customer service in 2000s and early 2010s was just unbelievable.
Once $800 lens was stuck in shipping going back and forth between various UPS hubs. I called Amazon, they saw tracking info and overnighted me a replacement lens. When the original lens finally got delivered, I called Amazon to return it, they initially told me to keep the lens for my troubles.
I didn't believe it, so I reminded the CS that it was $800 lens, if she was sure. She doublechecked and issued me return label. (I know)
Anytime, I had any issue with Kindle, no matter how small, they would send me a new Kindle even if it was out of warranty.
Many times when I tried to return an item, they simply told me to keep the item and issued me refund. (Though they still do it but not as much).
(Before they left the cell phone market,) Ting was the best phone company ever.
The anti-competitive behavior of the big cellular providers drove their costs for buying bandwidth through the roof and killed their MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) business.
Ting had a motto on their web site "Ting Hearts Hackers." They walked people through jail-breaking their phones.
They had live humans in my home state who did not have accents who answered the phone 24/7 to help, and knew much more then this former telecom programmer about the phones and the service.
They helped me when an eBay seller screwed me and sent me a phone locked to another network by buying it out from being locked and comped me the buy out because they said I was a loyal customer.
Scanned the whole thread to find this and if I hadn't, I'd have posted it myself. Hard agree.
We use them at every one of our business locations - even the ones where they don't own their own infrastructure. There, they re-sell AT&T's ADSL (which, um, is terrible, but sometimes all we can get), and whatever premium they charge is worth it 100x because they are an interface layer between us and AT&T's monumentally awful customer service.
An Icelandic ISP that I've been a very happy customer with for years.
Some years ago, back before I bought my self some proper networking equipment, I was renting a router from them. On a Saturday evening the connection went down and so I reached out to them on Twitter for help. We worked out it must be the router giving out. Within an hour there was an employee from them standing on my doorstep with a new unit for me. At 21:00 at night!
And roughly two years ago they sent me an email saying they had just reduced the monthly fee by a considerable amount (~10%).
Alaska Airlines support has been amazing, unmatched lately. Immediately speaking with a person, immediately response and actions without the “I hear you” bs and “thank yous” and “we’re so happy to waste your times”.
But it’s serviced by BofA. The absolutely worst banking service for anything I’ve ever used. The WORST KYC process ever experienced. I’m disabled. They made me physically come in to a location very far way, apparently they’re now all ATMS with a few brick stores. No drive through. The bank manager goes around to people standing in line and asks identifying and personal banking questions out in the open for everyone the hear and learn.
I don't know about Braintree, but I did recently have a frontline customer support email to a consumer product company answered (incorrectly) by an LLM. I know that it was an LLM because it said that it was in a footer below the response.
It was quite annoying and I had to email the company a second time because the LLM response checked some "did we respond" box on their system.
System76. I bought a laptop that had some serious issues with internals. They helped me troubleshoot it via email by tearing it down and putting it back together. I was so impressed that I bought a mini PC from them too.
German Light Products, they make stuff like stage lights and controllers for those.
We had an old DMX controller lying around at my school, and one of the faders was broken. I kind of liked the device, it had some charm, so I decided to repair it. I searched for compatible faders and found one with a similar enough footprint on Mouser, but it was out of stock or something. After days of searching online, I decided to call them, maybe they used similar faders in newer products or something. They were really nice and actually had a replacement in stock for this more than 20 year old thing! I did have to fill out some customer registration form that was clearly aimed at repair shops and the like, but they were super friendly and told me to just leave out all the stuff that didn't apply to me.
Also, half-relatedly, the repair was wonderful. It was clear that the controller was made with durability and repairability in mind. The metal case could be opened with just a few screws, the one cable I had to get out of the way was on a JST connector, and they even had the uC on a header so you could replace it if it failed.
I hope they still make their stuff like that, and I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
Spothero. I have problems with about 5% of the parking spots I reserve through them, which is a massive number compared to most websites I use. But their support reps are so awesome that I keep going back.
Southwest Airlines. On more than one occasion, they showed human vs corporate levels of empathy and help, and I patronize them with mid 5 figures of annual spend in return.
It's funny how different and polarizing individual experiences can be. My MIL loves SWA for much the same reasons, but they're one of the worst airlines in mine.
T-Mobile. I've been a TMo customer for most of 20 years. Every time I've needed anything they've taken care of it with no fuss.
Recently I added a line to my account, and ended up getting charged the wrong amount, because I have a very old plan and whoever added the line couldn't figure out how to make it the right price. One call, no transfers, and they fixed it to the correct price and refunded me the excess charge.
Microsoft, I have a wireless sculpt keyboard + mouse. The mouse scroll wheel stopped working 2 years in. I called MS support and they sent me a full replacement (keyboard + mouse) at no cost.
Chic-filla - made an online group order for about $60, they forgot to include an item of <$10 value. Called and they gave a refund for the full order.
Microsoft blocked me after I purchased a gift card for my nephew. So I will never be able to buy a gift card from them again… The support couldn’t do anything about it. I can live with that but it definitely left a bad taste in my mouth.
Apple, software side. I use Apple Notes on my macbook, phone and windows machine through the browser. One day, an important (to me) functionality had stopped working in the browser version only. I knew it should be there and thought they must have updated something and broken that in the process. It happens. I was bugged more than I should have been so I filed a request on the Apple website. Less than an hour later, I get a phone call. When the person on the phone understands they are looking at something real, they ask if they can connect me to an engineer. I talked to some engineer, walked them through the issue. The issue was fixed in the same day. It was so easy. I was shocked a company so big could function on such a personal level. To me that is the mark of great customer service.
Recipal. I was building an automated feed for nutritional data based on what customers purchased from the company I worked for as a proof of concept (it was a company sponsored 48 hour hack day).
We found Recipal which really suited what we were attempting to build, but they had a $49 a month API licence cost. I reached out to the founder, Lev, who very graciously provided us API keys for as long as we needed for free, and offered support along the way.
It’s a small gesture in the grand scheme of things, but the whole process was super smooth.
I reached out, just hours later he responded, explaining typically they wouldn’t do it, but he was interested in what we were building. I outlined the details and within the hour he’d produced me a free account to use at no cost, just because he thought it was cool!
Patch My PC has constantly blown me away with their customer support. They go above and beyond routinely.
Hy-Vee has been pretty good but they've only been in my area about a year. Employees are always friendly and professional.
For cell phones visible used to blow me away but that was coming from ATT, sprint and Verizon where you're treated like a pain in their ass, not a customer.
Worst off the top of my head:
Google for anything since they avoid any support at all. Low tier Microsoft support, Verizon, Activision, DxO Photo (paid twice for their elite software and can't activate it now) and AutoDesk is all around awful with how they treat everyone from hobbiests to enterprises and their software is kludgy.
Allstate/SquareTrade has been awesome. I bought a nightmare of a dishwasher that's needed repairs three times now. Each time I call, I'm on hold for under a minute, they do some brief trouble shooting, and then they overnight parts and a technician is there in 2-3 days.
Vanguard. Generally speaking, the brokerages I've had to interact with have been solid, but Vanguard is my primary and they're great.
Super polite and helpful over the phone and I've never run into a situation where you get tossed around from rep to rep.
I had contributed to a Roth IRA but then my income changed and I realized I wasn't able to contribute to a Roth for the year. The customer support took care of _everything_ over the phone and described the "recharacterization" process. He even explained how to go about a backdoor Roth IRA on their platform as well as the pitfalls.
Same great experience having to deal with roll overs as well.
This won’t matter to most people because they aren’t a consumer company, but in the enterprise storage world, Qumulo has the best support of any enterprise vendor I’ve ever worked with. They are the platinum standard by which I judge all other vendors now.
I made another comment already, but also:
Uberspace!
They're a shared hoster with a pay-what-you-want/can model. They have pretty solid documentation for most things one could care about. I had some problems a few times (which were all caused by me doing something wrong), and whenever I had to email them I got a helpful and friendly reply within a short time. They always helped me fix the issues, even if it was my fault and/or took a few steps to properly diagnose. They also have a blog where they share some behind-the-scenes info, which is always interesting.
Popping off your comment, to recommend EU customers stay clear of Coya insurance.
Under Coya (Berlin based) they were amazing: cheap, responsive, helpful. Then post-pandemic they were acquired by Luko (a French firm), and their reliability and communicability dropped considerably (read: mass layoffs, AI chatbot hell, all claims via App, website just for decoration). It took 11 months to resolve a small incident, where they knew that 1 month longer and I could have legally sued them. As of last week, they've since been acquired by GetSafe; likely meaning even more layoffs.
TLDR, stay clear from: Coya, Luko, GetSafe
Your insurer should be somebody you can just phone up, though I know how hard that is for non natives.
GetSafe apparently has runway for another year, right now (a friend of mine interviewed, and the recruiter let on). I've used them for a couple of years, but probably wouldn't open an account with them now. They're generally OK, but for a while, kept trying to push their crappy private pension on me via cold calls.
First Republic. I would never have sought out something like that, but they wrote my mortgage so I had to use their checking account. But it was pretty cool to have a guy who I could email directly, instead of a 1-800 number phone tree.
I have no idea if this is still the case but Mark Monitor a DNS registrar had highly responsive support and people that knew all the limitations, requirements and regulatory issues around all of the ccTLD's which is trickier than one might think until they try to register their domains on every ccTLD. They saved me a lot of time. I migrated multiple companies to Mark Monitor and never regretted it.
Another one that I have no idea of their current status but had incredible support was Checkpoint. They would quickly escalate weird TCP/IP bugs in their firewall to people that actually knew how their firewall handled each and every part of the IP stack. One time they unwittingly helped me argue with a customer about some simple aspects of TCP/IP. The customer a self proclaimed CCIE hung up in embarrassment and anger and Checkpoint apologized to me and I said, "No no, you were perfect, Thankyou!"
Less about another company and more about former coworkers, ages ago I worked along side some network engineers that would go out of their way to troubleshoot network issues on the customers devices for them even though they had their own network engineers and they would figure it out every time. They were former UUNet folks. If you have former UUNet engineers, keep 'em happy.
Another group I had really good interactions with was the part of IBM that still supported Sequent NumaQ / Dynix PTX. IBM is expensive but that group was worth it, trying to keep those old beasts alive. One of the independent contractors that supported those systems was also very pleasant to work with. Always friendly and always willing to go out of their way to help. One of IBM's engineers that wrote the bonding code in Linux also went out of his way to help me with a weird bug.
One that is long gone but was incredible was Sun Microsystems. My customers would tickle some of the strangest kernel bugs. I could send Sun core dumps and they would send me a new kernel package the same day. I also experienced that once with Redhat but that was a lucky one-off because a kernel developer replied to me email directly for a funny NetApp CIFS mixed mode bug in RHEL4. He was out bicycling with his kids and took the time to help me.
Been quite a few years ago, but Dell support came to a tiny campground 100 miles from anywhere and swapped out my laptop motherboard within 24 hours of it failing. Sadly, their support is no longer as extraordinary.
I called, the automated phone system was designed to funnel me towards a real person rather than away from one; one layer of inputs and I was in a queue. I spoke with someone in less than 5 minutes, they spoke my language well (English) and didn't seem to be in a hurry, and they listened to me vent a bit and ultimately answered my question.
Then I called a related state run entity. Their phone system was long and confusing, I chose the wrong option and had to start over, and after what felt like a successful hack I got put in a 30 minute queue and ultimately gave up.
I can’t say it these days, but Apple. About 20 years ago I bought an Xserve and their RAID system. A couple of terabyte RAID on a fibre channel connection.
It had trouble booting properly when the user homedir was on the RAID. I called Apple, was quickly transferred to someone else. That person listened and then said “please hold”. About 15 minutes later he came back and said “OK I’ve duplicated the bug, here’s the ticket number, we’ll get you a fix ASAP”.
AppleCare is pretty nice but can only handle straightforward things.
Amazon India (the online store) has the best customer care of all the services I have used. They provide chat and call service and are always helpful.
On the contrast, Google always says "our agents are busy" or asks me to send emails which get no reply.
In my opinion, having a customer care where you get to chat or talk to a real human is enough. I hate the AI chat bots or the "submit this form and we will (not) get back to you" :(
Two game controller companies. Garvis (1998) & Mad Catz (2004)
My Gravis Xterminator's cable was coming out of the controller body. They shipped me a new one, and the box came with a return label. All free of charge.
My Mad Catz PS2 controller's tumbsticks had some stick-drift. They wouldn't replace the whole unit (out of warranty?) but did send me replacement parts for free. The rep. said they'd sent almost any replacement part for free.
Notion and Vercel, back in the day. You'd talk to some engineer at Notion helpig them file a bug and reproduce it, and a week later it'd be fixed. You'd get Guillermo Rausch looking through your project on Github to find what's causing Vercel to crash.
Nowadays... you submit a bug to Notion, the support person is snarky and tells you "it's supposed to work that way" and a year later the bug is still there.
Vaxee for computer mice. After being impressed with their lineup, I bought an XE for a friend. His cat has eaten the cable twice, and they sent him fresh ones when he contacted them to see if he could buy more. They also sent me a mouse pad as a thank you for Christmas one year. Extremely friendly and warm every time.
I can tell you my worst CS experience was with scaleway.It felt like they were trolling me the entire time my server was down. I have ainced moved on to digitalocean where I have great support and docs.
Kenna. I was sort of underwhelmed by them at the time, but having worked with other third party security service vendors since then, in comparison, they're really top notch. Their documentation is amazing and the customer service reps are technical and they care about the issues you are running into.
I'e been very impressed with my DNS provider, Loopia. For years they've been consistently quick to turn around my occasional requests for help with stuff not possible in the web UI or that requires involvement with the national registrar (myself mixing up personal and corporate identities purchasing domains).
https://krakatoaunderwear.com/ The customer support and focus on customer experience is worth the couple of extra dollars. Also the product feels very well made.
True Classics also has really great customer support in my opinion.
American human operators answers my question at any time I had a problem, cheap rates, and supports esim. I don't know how they can afford real Americans to do CS but I haven't left this company which was supposed to be temporary because it's one of the CHEAPEST mvnos with AMERICAN OPERATORS?!
Eight Sleep - my topper leaked and damaged my mattress, I was not happy to say the least. I filled out an online form, got a response in minutes via email and after confirming my details they organized a replacement of both free of charge despite being out of warranty.
Start.ca, a regional Internet service provider in Ontario. Someone always picked up the phone, and it was always a knowledgeable in-house CSR, not some outsourced operation where the workers are afraid to lose their jobs if they don't follow the script.
Believe it or not, Comcast Business was great back in the day. One day my cat puked right on the modem/router, killed it. They had a guy out that night with a replacement.
Today, it's terrible. 2-3 day wait. I cancelled them as soon as a new provider came to town.
Candykeys. They let me yolo a soldering fix on a keyboard and would honour warrant if unsuccessful
Makes commercial sense for them here (only upside) but few vendors will honour warranty on gear that has been attacked with a soldering iron by an amateur
I broke a camera while installing it and when I contacted them to see if repair was possible (because, as I told them, the camera being broken was entirely my fault), they just asked for a copy of the invoice and sent me a new one.
Mixpanel. I forgot my email and the support on the other end just gave me a hint like “do you remember having an email like *@**.xyz.” No unnecessary reset or anything like that.
Paypal.
Bought 2 but the shop only sent me 1.
The shipping company provided me their weight log show that they have only picked up 1 item.
Paypal refused to refund.
They act as a broker for home insurance. They consistently will find the lowest rates, easy to get a phone agent, and have people waiting to walk you through the process.
T-Mobile is solid all around (>>> AT&T or shudder Verizon), but US Consumer Cellular has one of the best customer service operations I've ever dealt with.
Not in my ecperience, although my many interactions with them were 10 years ago, so they might have gotten better. It still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
This needs an addendum: AWS support is top notch, as long as your AWS fees are already on the hefty side. Which makes sense.
But also, it can be frustrating to deal with them when it comes to anything that's not a clear incident on their part, or requires optimization over troubleshooting, e.g. a few years ago, we had a few instances underperforming because of higher than expected I/O loads and low associated EBS bandwidth, and they never gave us a solution for it.
Their phone number (I.e. their company name) goes straight to customer service. Like, you call it, it rings, customer service picks up. I thought it was a scam at first.
If that's not fast enough for you, you can text them too.
Returns are super generous. You can swap out entire boxes no problem. They'll also re-send contacts if you're traveling and they don't get to you in time.
I absolutely love this company. It's like they lost the memo to enshittify themselves by offshoring their second-tier CS and replacing their first-line CS with a chat bot.
Runner-Ups:
- Apple: So many ways to reach them and they try their best to make it right. It's a little harder to reach them now than before, most of their support is offshored (used to be state-side), and they are more by the book
- T-Mobile: TMo Experts were awesome. You could reach one at any time, stateside, and they could do just about anything to get you back up and running. Sadly almost all of them are offshored now thanks to aggressive cost-cutting post COVID.
- Marriott's Ambassador Concierge: You used to get a direct line to a concierge that was _your_ concierge. (Well, you and 30 others, but stil.) They used to help you with anything and everything. Extremely useful if you're in a bind and need help now; a very likely situation given that you have to stay 100 nights/year to reach this tier. COVID tore that up. They're now just a faster way to reach CS.
And in honorarium:
Simple Bank. When they started, they were AMAZING. You could call or chat with a real person in the US whenever you hit a snag. They were super responsive and very helpful. Their app and website were also like nothing the big banks offered (though, ironically, I miss m.chase.com, as that was stupid simple and INSANELY FAST). Unfortunately, they could never get past data issues, which caused lots of duplicate/incorrect transactions and limitations that were basically warmups for the stodgier mainframes they were attempting to replace (like super low eCheck limits routed through ACH regardless of whether the recipient supported faster transfer methods). This caused their customer service to become CRAZY slow. What was once a two minute wait became 35, and chat messages would get responses days later instead of minutes. They merged into BBVA and then disappeared.
I once had my debit card canceled due to fraud while traveling internationally, and they shipped a replacement via both UPS and Fedex to ensure a replacement got to me as quickly as possible.
I have no doubt they've lost money on me as a customer in my lifetime, but I have nothing but amazing things to say about them and I suspect they'll make it up later in life when I have more assets to work with.