It's easy to moan about pisspoor companies who don't get that 'customers' are a vital part of their 'business'.
Sometimes we forget to praise the businesses who are run by grown-ups and appear to have an instinctive grasp that paying customers are pretty important to their business, income and profit.
Sixapart, makers of Movable Type, Typepad, Typekey etc...
I made them a payment for an annual service using Jimmy's credit card. This annual service included a two week trial period during which no attempt would be made to debit the card.
Towards the end of that two week trial period Jimmy lost his credit card and had to cancel it, and I thought, oh no, Six Apart will try to debit the payment, and it will be refused and it will all go horribly wrong.
So I emailed them, explaining the circumstances and that HSBC said it would be 7-10 days before the replacement arrived and I would be ever so grateful if you would allow me a short period of grace under the circumstances. This was on a Sunday afternoon Mid afternoon Monday they emailed me back. Their response was: yes, of course, we'll extend your deadline. Oh, and by the way, even then we give you another seven days to sort out any card errors. And even after that, although we suspend your account, we don't delete it, so once you pay up, everything is back to where it was.
That is what I call customer service. A swift and positive response to a request. No baby talk. A recognition of a fairly common problem and a practical sensible procedure for managing it. It isn't difficult and shouldn't be noteworthy, but in my experience, such behaviour is way too rare.
