BT’s recent handling of a technical query of mine supports my contention that it’s the small things that create superior service. As the name Open Chord implies I’m pretty passionate about music so if I’m working at my home office I’ll have music on for most of the day. As a BT Yahoo subscriber I get the Launchcast Plus service as part of the package – yes, last.fm may be hipper and better but I started with Launchcast so I’ll carry on – and was surprised last Wednesday to see the player screen had changed from the simple design above to a more complex one with added ‘buy’ buttons and a side panel with rolling ads. No problem in itself but, to my great irritation, the jazzy audio soundtrack to my working day would be interrupted every 10-15 minutes with a 30-second radio ad either advertising new Yahoo features or some business in the US.

I checked the bt.com and Yahoo site for any obvious information regarding a change to the service, couldn’t find anything and so sent in an e-mail enquiry. Within a couple of hours I had had an e-mail response telling me this was a matter for the technical help desk and arranging a time for a call back.

This was a bit frustrating as I felt it was a fairly straightforward query that could easily have been answered in an e-mail – or even by posting an FAQ or on a user forum. And to make matters more annoying no-one called back in the agreed 2 hour window on Monday afternoon.

This morning I did get a call during the re-arranged time and this is where BT demonstrated that a superior service is possible. As it turned out the problem with Launchcast appeared to have righted itself and I was back to the old player screen and ad-free service. The advisor used Citrix GoToAssist to access my PC remotely, but in the end there wasn’t really a need.

So far, this transaction was functional rather than superior. We agreed on the call that I didn’t really need a further call back in a couple of days and would e-mail if there were any further problems. However the same advisor did call me back about 20 minutes later to check if the service was still working OK. (In fact I’d had one of the occasional streaming problems that can cause my browser to crash so he advised me to upgrade to IE7 as this should solve it.) At this point my experience became a superior one because the advisor appeared to take the trouble to make sure everything was OK- even though I hadn’t really requested it.

This wasn’t in the same league as losing your phone or broadband connection or other disasters but it did illustrate some of the hallmarks of superior service:

• Attention to detail
• Going the extra ‘mile’
• Adding extra value

And also proves that even in the largest, most impersonal organisations it can be done!