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A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

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Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#11

Post by yakshaving »

I had a chance to see Tim O'Reilly speak at SXSW. He was giving a talk expressly about this: Creating more value than you can capture.

I took some notes on it if anyone wanted to check them out. http://storify.com/ashbhoopathy/create-more-value-than-you-c...

I guess the real amazing thing here is that Tim's generosity and ethos trickles down to his entire company and everything they do, including customer service.

I hope more technologists and organizations work the same way. It really just is better business.

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#12

Post by eric_bullington »

While we're praising O'Reilly, I should mention Safari Books Online. I'm sure you've all seen the promotions for the service in any O'Reilly book you purchase. I'm a subscriber, and it's a great service. I get electronic access to almost every book in the O'Reilly library, plus books from a number of other tech publishers, all for a little over $20 a month ($45 if you want to get rid of the 10 books/month limit).

It's been great for when I need to review some new technology (e.g., HTML5) but don't want or need to read an entire book about the topic in question. And it works great on my Kindle. Also -- and I'm sure O'Reilly is aware of this -- when I find something particularly good on Safaribooksoline, I sometimes end up purchasing the "deadtree" version of such books so I can have a physical book to read when I'm away from the computer/Kindle.

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#13

Post by babarock »

ma2rten wrote: post #10

As much as I share your admiration for O'Reilly, this is seems to be common practice. It's just more expensive to get the items back in inventory again than what they are actually worth. See this thread: "Microsoft suggests customer donate extra X-Box they sent him." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3434404

Vaguely related, my mother in law wakes up one day and finds over 20 box of various cookies delivered to her apartment. She contacted the company to let them know of the mistake. They answered that it would cost too much to get them back in inventory.

I've been eating cookies for the past month now; what a happy mistake :)

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#14

Post by Moto7451 »

When I worked at a store with a book section, it was often times cheaper just to eat the mistake than to hassle the customer and pay for return shipping (especially for the store's self published titles).

In fact its probably the cheapest way you can get customer loyalty. If you really take care of a customer, they'll often times stick with you even if you're slightly more expensive than their alternatives.

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#15

Post by spxdcz »

I had the fortune of visiting the O'Reilly offices in Sebastopol a few weeks ago (thanks Mary!), and this gracious attitude permeates the building. It may be one of the happiest, friendliest offices I've had the fortune of visiting. Plus, the Make offices are just incredibly cool - like a real-life Willy Wonka factory, with hundreds of cool half-built gadgets scattered around.

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#16

Post by radicalbyte »

Erwin wrote: post #9

I've had the same experience with Amazon, when orders have gone wrong which I think is even more impressive given they're much larger and public. It shows is possible not to put short-term profits first -- some people excuse "evil" acts by companies as being required by shareholders.

Amazon.co.uk are excellent, but Amazon.de are terrible. They have two listings for Quarriors - one is the German language version and the other English. We order the English version, and receive the German version. Their solution? They only stock the German version (their English listing was an error) so we had to send the German version back to them (partly at our cost).

Fine. The .co.uk do it better (you can keep the incorrect item). But returning is reasonable enough.

But they've not bothered to correct their listings despite several attempts to fix the problem.

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#17

Post by kranner »

+1 for O'Reilly Customer Service: when they released The Cathedral and The Bazaar (or was it Free as in Freedom?, can't say for sure), I wrote to them saying that it was funny that a book on free software wasn't itself free to read.

They shipped me a free copy and a Python T-shirt (to India). I was in my teens: life-long fan since.

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#18

Post by ppjim »

I happened something similar to request a book on lulu.com. Asked for a book and after a month had not arrived (I had requested by mail). As I said they were going to send me another book. After 3 days the book arrived at my house and inform them by email to cancel the second book. They told me the book and was on his way, so I could donate if I wanted. :)

Re: A+ for O'Reilly Customer Service: Keep the books and donate them

#19

Post by jasonlotito »

eric_bullington wrote: post #12

While we're praising O'Reilly, I should mention Safari Books Online. I'm sure you've all seen the promotions for the service in any O'Reilly book you purchase. I'm a subscriber, and it's a great service. I get electronic access to almost every book in the O'Reilly library, plus books from a number of other tech publishers, all for a little over $20 a month ($45 if you want to get rid of the 10 books/month limit). It'…

I'll second this, and add, I've purchased more books because of seeing and reading them on Safari Books Online then I think I would have otherwise. The wealth of knowledge available with a subscription is amazing.
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