shopping0206

Calling Customer Service:
How To Win The War
by Gwendolyn Lee

Customer service, how I loathe thee. Let me count the ways. The never-ending loop of obnoxious hold music. The pressure to buy new products and services. The poor-quality, outsourced call to a distant land.

A call to customer service can be an infuriating ending to a frustrating experience. You're upset and looking for empathy, but all you encounter is disappointment. Could Company X have done something differently? Probably, but if you follow these tips when dealing with customer service, you'll be in the driver's seat for the next dispute.

1. Be prepared
Seems basic, right? Unless you've called Company X several times, you're probably not familiar with their required information. Have every tracking number, account number, itemized statement, and order number before you call. Customer service representatives are held responsible for torturous call-handling metrics designed by masochistic management. Length of call, resolution (if the customer calls back to the company within an allocated amount of time), and randomly monitored calls are measured stringently. Bottom line: they want to help you quickly and completely, lest a superior crack a whip.

2. Be nice
Customer service representatives speak with upset, irritated, and/or irate people all day. Every day. You may not agree with a credit denial, but screaming "the customer is always right, (expletive)! will not help. Be pleasant and the rules may be malleable. Be another unpleasant customer and the guidelines will be set in stone.

3. Know when to call, know when to write
If you need to request a price quote, add/remove a feature, or ask for explanation of a bill, e-mail is the most efficient route for your correspondence. For repair concerns or credit requests, call customer service. Repair specialists will need to troubleshoot and get access information should a technician need to be dispatched. Credit requests can be handled via e-mail, however, it is easier to reply with a "credit denied form letter than to deny credit to a real, live person.

4. Get on record
If something is not working properly, call the company immediately. If there is a cable, satellite, or phone outage, Company X will only be able to diagnose and correct the problem if they are notified a problem exists. This also establishes a record of communication should you need to request a credit or refund at a later date.

5. Be persistent, but not obnoxious
Many companies have guidelines for dispensing credit that require denial the first time for any request that is not a previously-reported "out of service issue or a known billing error. The second time a credit request is made, these guidelines can be relaxed. If you have followed the "be nice tip above, you may be rewarded with your credit request.

Following these five tips will help you get what you want in the most efficient manner possible. Stay tuned for the next installment to find out how you can aggravate the customer service experience and actually delay resolution!

About the Author
Gwendolyn Lee is a statistician and analyst of Internet-related metrics for www.rubberstamps.net. She has researched and implemented business models to maximize profitability, efficiency and advertising tracking.

Shopping Online - Protect Yourself
by Joseph Kenny

These days, there are great bargains to be found by shopping online. Many items that previously were only available in stores are now being bought and sold online every day. Books, cds, DVDs and electronics are all growing in popularity as online purchases. Then there are things like flights, hotel bookings, car rentals and the like that are which are well established in the online shopping world. More and more stores are putting up websites that allow you to make online orders and even supermarkets now let you do your grocery shopping online and they�ll deliver the goods to your door.

Added to this growth in stores and other big business websites, there are also millions of small traders offering you goods online too. Online auction sites such as ebay are experiencing phenomenal success. These types of purchases however carry the risk that you do not really know who you are dealing with but you have to give them sensitive financial information in order to pay for your purchases. You are forced to choose between buying from small sellers and then trust them with your card details, or forgo the opportunities they offer and deal only with large and trusted names.

Payment Sites
This problem has been recognised and that is why it is now possible to shop online from lots of small sellers while maintaining your privacy and keeping your financial information secure. There are payment sites with the most popular probably being paypal, that are set up specifically to deal with issues like these. Indeed, paypal is now owned by ebay, which shows the link in importance between the two services offered by these companies.

What websites like paypal allow you to do is pay open an online account for free. You can then transfer money into your account using a standard credit card payment procedure. The advantage of this is that while you are providing your card information to paypal, this is the only company who you are giving this information to and since they are large and therefore, hopefully, trustworthy, your privacy and security should be safe.

Then when you make all your various purchases with smaller, more anonymous traders, all you do is make the payment through paypal and this avoids all the dangers having to give all your sensitive data out again and again. It is another example of how using credit cards online are becoming safer and more convenient.

About the Author
Joseph Kenny is the webmaster of the UK credit card comparison site www.creditcards121.com/, where you can find a selection of credit card advice. For US visitors there is also the comparison site www.credit-cards-info.com/ for all US interest.