Ask HN: What companies have blown you away with their customer support?
I'm curious about stories of excellent customer support because it seems so rare these days, especially with corporates.
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.
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.
https://www.nceo.org/articles/employee-ownership-100
(i love publix, no other affiliation)
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.
How low have they fallen since their publicity department was praised by John Cleese at the 1989 Academy Awards.
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.
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.
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?
Maybe it's because they are not so tighly constrained to a target number of callers to answer to?
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.
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’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.
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.)
Also, RevZilla's media group, Common Tread, is one of the last great motorcycle journalism and video/podcast production outfits left.
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).
You’re soof’d if not
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.
They have, literally, the best customer service experience I've ever encountered as a customer.
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.
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.
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.
Fidelity: While I haven't needed to contact them much, each time I did, a human support provided good help.
Wells Fargo: Always provided good service. There have been a few incidents recently where they could have done better.
Source: been a Wells customer for 30 years (still am) and credit unions are soooo much nicer to work with.
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).
A+
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 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.
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).
Their on time shipment is horrid though and constantly is days later than the website says even across different states.
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.
I miss Ting.
Tech support people are knowledgeable, pleasant, available, and solve any problems I’ve had. Such a contrast to cable companies or wireless providers
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.
They are beyond fantastic.
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%).
I point anyone who will listen towards them.
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.
Cap.One and Amex were amazing though.
The most recent interaction with Braintree support was very weird though. I honestly started to suspect I'm talking to an LLM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
My home router manufacturer: https://avm.de
Amazon isn't that bad either.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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" :(
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.
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.
The only good telecom provider in the country
My favourite aspect of their service is they answer the phone, with a domestically based human, in under 1-2 minutes
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?!
HOW?!
Today, it's terrible. 2-3 day wait. I cancelled them as soon as a new provider came to town.
Their customer service and return policies.
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.
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.
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.
Monta for Swiss watches.
Isovalent (Cilium CNI) for software.
Anti-excellent support: paypal
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.
AAA DMV services.
US Postal Service.
BHPhoto.
REI.