E-commerce customer service has come a long way. What used to be transactions with unknown agents has evolved to something much more friendly and approachable. Perhaps no company exemplifies this better than Zappos.com, which anoints itself a “customer service company that happens to sell shoes.” Stories abound how even the CEO, Tony Hsieh, responds personally to emails; we reached out to him and ended up having a brief but personal chat over email.

However, Zappos seems to be the exception. We’ve had three online experiences in the last 24 hours that illustrate the broad spectrum of online customer service:

• Big Box Office Supply: We bought a printer under rebate and they gave us the classic runaround: “We can’t help you. You need to call someone else.”
• Event Tickets: We bought tickets to attend a high-demand event directly from the organizers. The ones running the event oversold tickets and claimed not to have received our order. Maybe an honest glitch but they said “too bad.”
• Gift Certificate: We bought a gift certificate that never got delivered. They said “sorry, our fault,” called us immediately and increased the original value by a fair amount for free.

One out of three isn’t bad but we think it should be much higher. Foodoro plans to do what it can to raise the average. We understand nobody is perfect, but admitting mistakes and making up for them goes a long way to making customers happy.

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