Here’s a fantastic example of exemplary customer service, and really exemplifies the quote we have on our front page from Richard Branson:

“Mistakes are inevitable. Dissatisfied customers are not.”

One of the Google Labs projects in the US is Google Transit. However, as this post describes, the directions were rather unhelpful in getting blogger Adam Darowski to his hotel: 90 minutes spent trying to get to a building that was visible, but on the wrong side of 8 lanes of freeway.

Google, seeing the blog, not only sent a hand-written humorous note of apology, but also a Superman cape — which fit perfectly with the humourous side of their letter.

This is in stark contrast to my recent experience with the Route Planner available on the Tourism Victoria website: directions starting from our place send us the wrong way down a one-way street, offer a u-turn into a non-existent section of road and then suggest driving down a private road (through Moonee Valley Racecourse) with gates at each end that are locked most of the time!

I contacted Tourism Victoria… no reply 9 weeks later. Yet here, Google read the blog and pro-actively made contact with the blogger to say sorry, offer a wonderful “gift” AND also explain how Google Transit would be fixed to avoid the problem.

Spot on, Google… a customer experience you’d never even dream about.