| Kippreport.com

At your service, finally…

March 27, 2011 5:00 by p.deleon

If you’ve been reading Kipp for a while then you’d know that we are far far from impressed by the shoddy service that passes off as customer care in Dubai. In fact just about a week ago we wrote a rather scathing piece on our utmost displeasure with a particular bank, primarily due to their awful customer service.

The numerous comments, Facebook likes and tweets that rant got, convinced Kipp that we are surely not at alone in our displeasure with customer care in the UAE. In fact, many of you Kipp readers started using the forum as a chance to vent your frustrations not only with the bank in question, but other banks and one even suggested we ‘open the can of worms’ on Etisalat and DEWA.

And as awful as customer care in Dubai can be, Kipp did read something in The National over the weekend that made us think we shouldn’t write the sector off completely.

Consider the case of Cobone.com, the popular money-saving-group-buying website, who sent out an email clarifying the details of a particular deal which promised pizza at less than half price. Pretty standard procedure, but this time around, the website had accidentally cc’ed in all the people who had opted for the deal- revealing their private email addresses to everyone on the email.

Though pizza, as The National points out, is not a particularly incriminating or embarrassing purchase, Cobone does offer deals on more personal deals like waxing, massages and the like that could be a source of embarrassment should the email addresses of the purchasers of the deal be made public.

So are you waiting for the good customer care part? Well, wait no longer dear Kipp reader! In a rather quick and speedy response to the situation Mohammed Abdelwahed, Cobone.com’s customer service manager emailed an apology to all of those CC-ed in on the email in question in which he wrote:

“On the 20th of March, the Cobone.com support team under my supervision contacted you with regards to the terms and conditions of the Telepizza deal (…) We understand that data privacy is a serious matter and would like to offer our most sincere apologies for this occurrence. This is an unfortunate and unique incident that in no way reflects the business values or efforts of the whole team to keep your personal information secure and private.”

In addition to their rather speedy and apologetic apology Cobone credited the accounts of all those affected with Dh50.
Now there’s good customer service for you (with the exception of the cc-ing faux-pas). It is more than encouraging to see such quick and well received steps from a local and young company barely even a year old.

Now we turn it over to you: have you experienced exceptionally good customer care in the UAE recently? What was your experience?

Tags: customer service, customer service Dubai bad, customer service Dubai good, customer service UAE, customer service UAE bad, customer service UAE good