This past week I had a pleasantly surprising service experience. A side-effect of this job is that I frequently find myself analyzing the components of various interactions I have as if I were at work, thinking about the various steps and systems involved, and where they might be improved.

I recently got a piece of mail from a credit union I am a member of with new account information and it appeared that some poor data entry person (or robot?) was working off a bad hangover, because it was garbled in ways I have never seen before. Not just names misspelled or letters dropped but whole parts look like someone fell asleep on the keyboard. Because of past experiences with Big Banks, I planned my call for when I knew I had a stretch of time free and steeled myself for navigating the inevitable automatic phone menus. Low expectations.

What happened next surprised me. I call the generic contact number on the mailing. A human picked up on the second ring. I explained my issue. That human understood and fixed the problem. And that was it! No transferred calls. No repeated explanations to multiple people or entering account numbers only to tell the same info to the eventual person you connect to.

The credit union is a fairly large regional entity, and so it is not like I’m calling their only branch. Someone has understood that it is a much more pleasant experience to have the person who answers the phone be knowledgable about a range of bank systems and empowered to handle a wide variety of potential issues. That person was not a low-skilled worker, they knew about the format of the mailing and what needed to be corrected where, so I’m willing to bet they were not the cheapest option, but they certainly were the most satisfying for a customer compared to the other options I’ve been through.

I’d be curious to know if I just called at a slow time or if they also have a program in place to maintain that kind service across different call volumes.