Quality of B&N Service

[ascherjim]

A week or so ago I bought my wife a Nook Color (attempting to wean her off her beloved IPaq) and it worked fine for a day and she loved it. After a day however it wouldn't any longer connect to her PC. She had to call B&N Tech Service and talk with technicians several times before the preliminary diagnosis that it was only(!) a cable problem began to look more serious. The last technician with whom she spoke told her to take it in to the nearest local B&N store, which fortunately was quite near. There, a very knowledgeable clerk got on the phone herself to tech service and, after several back and forth phone calls between them, my wife was issued a new Nook Color on the spot, which is so far working perfectly. (Although she did have to call tech service again when it seemingly wasn't connecting to the internet. However, the technician helped resolve the problem by identifying my wife's inadvertent mis-entering of our WEP code.)

In all of the above, we found that the personalized support we received from actual live people at B&N (by phone to tech support and in-store) was superb, and we are much impressed and gratified.

However, when we have concurrently had to deal with B&N Customer Service by email (on matters of ordering the Nook Color and subsequent purchasing of Nook Books) our experience has been just the opposite. Uninformed and unresponsive.

So, the lesson we believe we have learned is that it is important when dealing with B&N to resolve a problem, it is far better to communicate with a real identifiable person, with a name. But isn't this usually the case in general?

[LoganK]

Originally Posted by ascherjim

However, when we have concurrently had to deal with B&N Customer Service by email (on matters of ordering the Nook Color and subsequent purchasing of Nook Books) our experience has been just the opposite. Uninformed and unresponsive.

I emailed Barnes & Noble to report a handful of formatting errors and minor mistakes in one of their books. Five days later I received a response telling me that "this situation would best be resolved with a phone call". Seeing as how it would be rather tedious to list this problems verbally, I decided to call when I had a healthy amount of free time. Two days after their response (before I had called back ... apparently I am supposed to have more patience than them), they closed the ticket and sent me a survey asking how they were doing.

And all of this was so that I could help them and future purchases of this book! I was not pleased, but, like you, I have been treated nothing but respectfully while in store.

[Doug Pardee]

B&N's email support operation is intended for low-priority FAQ-type issues. They try to respond within 48 hours, and the response is almost always either a canned response or "call us".

B&N expects that if you have a real problem, you'll call them. Personally, I'd never bother with the email support.

[MV64]

As an employee of BN stores, we do provide better service. We have problems all the time with Customer Service either not knowing what they're doing or being totally inefficient about it. We try our best to fix the nook in the store, but sometimes you need access to things that only Customer Service has. I can tell you there's nothing more frustrating than having to send a customer away to deal with customer service on their own.

[boswd]

also in the future if your wife finds the computer is not seeing the nook color, make sure it's unlocked first. found that out the hard way. I was one second from calling when my wife said see what unlocking it does. and that was it.

[taustin]

When I was looking at buying an ebook reader, one of the reasons I was drawn to B&N instead of Amazon is that B&N has always been a brick & mortar store, with decades of experience at person-to-person customer service, while Amazon is an online only store. The difference is important. Amazon is great to deal with so long as you need something they expected you to want, when they created their web site. As soon as you need something special, you have to deal with a person, and Amazon doesn't like to do that (because customer service people who aren't idiots cost a lot of money). With B&N, I just go to the local store and they take care of it.

(My first Nook classic had a problem charging, a day after I got it. They verfied the problem, and exchanged it. End of problem.)

[aagstn]

I just got off the phone with B&N and it was a pleasant experience. Guy was knowledgeable and my new Nookcolor is on the way. They ship you a replacement pretty quickly. Hopefully the replacement doesn't have the screen issues of my current Nookcolor.

[bookwerm]

My experience with B&N Customer Service has been exactly the opposite. I am one of the unlucky folks who keep getting the cracked button problem. If B&N wanted to have exceptional CS, the first thing they'd do is actually fix the design problem. But they're not. Instead, they've created a replacement program that lets customers think they're receiving awesome service. To me, the best CS is to sell me a product that works so I never have to actually call the company's CS. But that's just me.

Nevertheless, I called B&N nearly 2 weeks ago to do the rapid replacement - again - and get a new nook (which will be up for sale in the Flea Market here as soon as I receive it, in case any of you are interested. ). Apparently rapid isn't so rapid any more, as 10 days later, I'm still without a replacement nook. I called CS yesterday - they told me it's been delivered to UPS, so I need to contact UPS to figure out what's up. Way to pass the buck, B&N.

I realize my experience is unique - I think B&N CS breaks down by having a poorly designed product; actually calling the 1-800 number is just giving them a 2nd chance to fix a bad situation. As far as criticizing Amazon CS - I'd like to know the circumstances if someone didn't receive excellent service. I've been a long-time amazon customer, and their CS is phenomenal - I've never had a problem that wasn't solved in under 10 minutes.

Just my $0.02.

[boswd]

I take all customer services stories from no matter what company with a grain of salt. Every company has their fantastic stories and everyone has the ones that weren't so happy.