'Firing the customer' from customer service

Lucy Kellaway wrote an interesting piece in the FT on customer service, titled "The case for turning customer delight into disgust." Here is an extract..."I shall try to keep this story brief as the details are tedious even to me - and it is my money that is at stake.

Last March I visited the EasyJet website and bought six flights to Menorca for £1,285.80. The promised e-mail confirmation didn't arrive, and on the "My EasyJet" page there was no record of the booking. So I went through the rigmarole of booking the tickets again. This time all went smoothly - until my bank statement arrived and I saw that EasyJet had pocketed the money twice.

Then began an e-mail correspondence with the EasyJet Customer Experience Team that is still going on, five months later. First they said it was my fault, as I had mistyped my e-mail address, and they owed me nothing. Then, after many protests from me, they finally agreed to repay the rather lower sum of £1,193.82.

Unfortunately, the money got lost in between leaving the cheap and nasty airline's bank account and arriving in mine. So we are still slogging it out..."

This experience is not unusual, especially when one is dealing with airlines. I teach customer relationship management and discuss these paragons of customer (dis)service in my classes. The Univ. of Michigan customer satisfaction survey (ACSI) ranks the cable companies and the airlines at the bottom- your experience is just one more data point affirming the
rankings..The current mode of operation appears to be to distress the customers enough so that they are delighted to get 'any' service at all.

For a different experience- yesterday I had gone to Menards, a local hardware store here, to get some scrap wood for a book shelf I am building. I needed 5 pieces, but the store had only 2 in the scrap wood bin (cheap wood). The manager of the section, Kyle, saw us sorting through and offered to help. He took a nice long piece of wood (not scrap), cut it into the three pieces I needed, and put bar codes on them so that I would be charged the same price as scrap wood when I checked out....I did fill out a form commending him and turned it in to his manager.