Great video of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos talking about starting the company from his house, through to the recent acquisition of Zappos.

We have all experienced it. The lazy shop attendant, the rude waiter, the shopkeeper that just doesn’t think his business even needs customers.

Our experience with these people and businesses often leave a lasting impression for a variety of reasons. In some cases we actually made a purchase from said business either out of necessity or the need to keep one’s sanity whilst the kids are screaming all the way through Westfield.

What often does not leave a lasting impression for us is when we have a positive customer service experience either pre, during or post purchase. Is this because we have come to expect a level of mediocrity in service that we only care to remember the disastrous and not the pleasant and helpful?

My recent experience in needing to purchase a new television (my beloved plasma died in a power surge) is not only a poster-child for the negative above, but a shining example for the positive.

Like many tech lovers out there, I relish the opportunity to purchase a new item and enjoy researching the various options available as well as digesting all manner of opinions and reviews. Having a short period of time to do my research when our TV departed this world, I went straight to the review blogs and hit up friends on Twitter for all manner of recommendations.

Within a few hours I had read all the reviews I could handle, and the tweets were coming in thick and fast recommending particular brands and answering the eternal question of Plasma vs. LCD (I went for Plasma).

Armed with the latest product knowledge from reviews and recommendations, I headed up to the Local Westfield to see what the local retailers had and if there were any decent specials. I visited David Jones, Myers, Harvey Norman, Dick Smith, Bing Lee and JB HiFi- this is where things got interesting.

Only 2 of the retailers even had staff interested in talking to customers, and of those only one was helpful. This ended up being on of the most positive buying experiences. The sales rep at JB HiFi was incredibly knowledgeable and honest (a rear quality). He mentioned reviews on blogs that I had read, and swayed me away from a more expensive product as it’s advantages were not worth the cost. I ended up receiving a good price for the unit and made the purchase on the spot.

Such a positive experience can leave a lasting impression on a consumer for years to come and cement the foundations of a positive and ongoing relationship with the brand. Additionally what many organisations, big and small, fail to understand is that one happy customer is worth a hundred more if they talk about their experience (the same is also true for the negative- with negative consequences).

In an age where conversation happens at the speed of light, and positive and negative experiences and feeling are shot around Twitter in an instant, organisations must pull out the proverbial finger to make sure that their customer service and overall customer experience is not just satisfactory but extraordinary.

I have been receiving Virgin Blue’s newsletter for some time now, and use them almost every time I need to fly to Melbourne to visit family. Recently the frequency of their newsletter was on the rise, and coinciding with their push relating to QANTAS’s change to their frequent flyer points system. It was at this point that I felt that I wanted to unsubscribe from their newsletter, simply because I didn’t need the updates, not that I wanted to discontinue my relationship with them in any way.

My first thinking was to simply scroll to the bottom of the most recent email and click the unsubscribe link. Much to my surprise, there was no such link to be found. Although they had taken the time to include about 4 paragraphs of terms and conditions relating to the offers within the newsletter, they had not included one of the most standard (not to mention required by law) features of a newsletter.

Instead there was simply an ‘Update Details’ link at the bottom of the email. This link took me to the Virgin Blue site and requested me to login with my Velocity number and password- neither of which I dad on hand nor should need to unsubscribe.

Feeling a little annoyed, I placed a post on twitter about the oversight, and gave it an @ reply to Sir Richard Branson. You can see the post below:

Next is where things TOTALLY turned around and forced me to not only praise Virgin Blue but prompted me to write this post.

The following day, just shy of 24 hours after my original post (23 hours an 47 minutes) I received the following tweet from Virgin Blue:

It is great to see brands monitoring what is said about them online through different social media, and very pleasing that they are taking the time to reply to individual post such as the one I sent. This is in stark contrast to the way that Jetstar seem to be using Twitter, as illustrated in Tiphereth Gloria’s Digital Tip blog post today Jetstar’s 5 cent Fail Sail.