Thought I’d post a short update on my saga with SubZero. After trying to go through their normal channels I found that SubZero’s Customer Service organization DOES seem to care about its customers. Unfortunately, the rest of the company still seems to lag behind. After all, most issues occur because of “upstream” problems, not because of broken processes in a Customer Service organization. Customer Service organizations do their best to try to remedy issues after they happen, but rarely are they directly able to correct problems at the source in order to prevent them from happening again. They’re trying to hear me, but until I see action from SubZero I still have the same perception of them. Don’t they understand that?

Your survey stinks because you wasted my time. You just want good news. No one seems to want to improve. I'd rather do business with someone who cares.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Customer Service organizations have the power of the voice-of-the customer. By quantifying it and with a little bit of financial linkage work they can show how promoters drive growth through word-of-mouth, and how detractors take away sales from bad “publicity.” Armed with those numbers, it’d be hard for any CEO to ignore the need to understand and resolve root-cause issues.

My recommendation for SubZero? Don’t TELL me that you heard me; SHOW me. My perceptions of SubZero are based on my experience. And though they seem to have good folks in the Customer Service department that can fix problems, the rest of their organization doesn’t feel the need to eliminate those problems from the start. Bummer… a fading of one of the few remaining American brands that stand for quality?

Remember – if your customer satisfaction program merely measures satisfaction without action then you are only ticking-off your customers. Customers aren’t research rats.  SubZero seems to show us an unfortunate example .

Yes, it’s true. I’m not happy at all with SubZero.  There, I said it.  Publicly.

I expected more from a premium brand which costs 2 to 3x the competition.  The brand promise is about quality.  Yet quality isn’t at all what I got.

Want to know what’s even more interesting?  Although I was unhappy with the experience to date, what really got me ticked off was when their 3^rd party survey company contacted me for SubZero’s satisfaction survey.  Not only did I tell them I was unhappy, but I responded “YES!” when I was asked if I “wanted someone from corporate to contact me.”  I was pleasantly surprised by the question and thought they might actually be able to rescue the relationship.

SubZero doesn't need to listen?

No such luck.  They never followed-up.  Never contacted me.  Never tried to fix it.

I could get into the details of why I was unhappy, but suffice it to say their quality control process seems to be completely non-existent.  It took 5 MONTHS to resolve the problem, with too many calls and 3 appointments where I needed to be waiting at home during their 4-hour time window for the field tech to arrive, only to find that SubZero had shipped defective parts 3 different times (yes, you read that right).

So now that they had their chance I feel compelled to write this.  I invite them to get in touch with me and see if they want my feedback so they can improve (what a gift to them!) – steveb@waypointgroup.org