Customer Service: A Comparison

A veritable plethora of blogs today! I did warn you I was trying to kill time...anyway, this blog comes from two conversations I had earlier today. Here's the pre-amble; Katie and I are going to Kefalonia on Sunday, as I'm sure you're already aware. Amongst the stuff we organised when we booked it was a hire car for one week - Wednesday to Wednesday. All paid for and sorted to be delivered to our apartment, but then two weeks ago we hear from my Dad that you have to put down a deposit via a credit card when they drop off the car to you.

So, concerned that we might not be able to accept our hire car from the company, I rang Avis to clarify. Tom picked up the phone, and asked what my enquiry was. Blunt, to the point, fair enough. I asked if we needed a credit card for the deposit. He said we don't have to put down a deposit, but a hold will be put on a credit card equal to the price of one full tank of petrol. When I asked if we had to have a credit card, he then asked what country we were hiring in. After I answered Greece, and more specifically, Kefalonia, he replied it has to be a credit card, and that no other form of payment was accepted.

I talked this through with Mum and Katie, and decided to ring back - we have no credit card, and there's no way we can borrow one of someone else's. Jenny picked up this time, greeting me with a good afternoon sir, asking my name and what she may do to help me. Already it seems better, no? After explaining the predicament she too asked what country and region we were holidaying in. She begged a moment's reprieve to check something, and a few seconds later told me that a visa debit card would be an acceptable alternative. She thanked me for my call and wished us both a good and enjoyable holiday.

Now I'm no customer service expert, but surely if you get into customer service, you should have at least a reasonable level of politeness, if not a genuine want to help others and sort out their problems. So now, everything is sorted for the holiday, and we now know when we get our hire car that we can hand over our visa debit card, safe in the knowledge we can have a week of driving around our destination island. Bliss.