Threadless is the darling of the Web 2.0 t-shirt world. There are other vendors out there, but these guys have the lock on a big chunk of the market. Why? Well, it's because they pay attention to what I call the Three Cs of Social Networking (more on that in a post very soon) - communication, collaboration and community. If you're a Threadless customer you'll understand, but for everyone else Threadless have a community-driven model of design for their shirts where the Threadless community collaboratively decides on new designs for shirts.
While this is a great example of the Web 2.0 model working, this isn't the point of this post. I'm posting about great customer service. Here's the story.
Back in December, I placed an order with Threadless. I had two issues with it; I couldn't find it through their Order Search (which may have been stupidity on my part) and after nearly four weeks since ordering, it hadn't arrived by Monday this week. I emailed them through their contact form letting them know. I got a personal reply back from Kristen (A person! With a name!) in their Customer Service Department.
Kristen let me know that it seemed my order hadn't been processed or had been lost. She had found all but one of the items on my order in their warehouse and offered me the opportunity to choose any other in stock item to replace the unavailable one. For the inconvenience, she also offered me a $7.00 coupon for use in their store. Now, $7.00 isn't much, but I hadn't actually suffered in any real way through this process, so I consider it a really significant goodwill gesture.
For my trouble, which they assumed was a problem at their end and not idiocy on the part of the customer, they made it easy for me to fix up the order and they offered me a store coupon that they didn't need to. That's attention to detail and great customer experience. I'll be back. Again and again (or as often as Alli allows, whichever comes first).
Well done, Threadless.
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