My wife and I have used them numerous times for many different services, including routine maintenance (e.g., oil and filter), auto-body work, repairing a broken automatic minivan door, and tire repair and replacement.

In all cases they have been friendly, responsive, and affordable and have delivered high-quality work on time.

Here are two examples of how great they are:

1. We needed a couple of body panels repaired and repainted after someone borrowing our minivan ran it into the side of his garage door (d’oh!). Stadium Auto Body said that all of the damaged panels would have to be replaced and gave us an estimate of $2,400. A-Z repaired the existing panels — no replacement parts needed — for only $860. While they were at it, they detailed the interior of the minivan at no extra charge!

2. Herb Chambers Honda said it would cost $400 to fix one of our automatic minivan doors, which was repeatedly sticking when we tried to open or close it. A-Z did the repair for only $169.

In all of our dealings with A-Z, it has felt like they were being completely honest and up-front with us. Not once have we gotten that unpleasant feeling, so common with car-repair places, that they were trying to jack up the price of a repair or sell us something we didn’t need. In short, these guys are great, and we heartily recommend them!

(click for a larger view)

Our family is celebrating my oldest daughter’s bat mitzvah in Israel this summer in a somewhat non-traditional way. She chose the David and Goliath story as the text for her bat mitzvah study project, and she will be giving a presentation on what she has learned followed by a tour of the Elah Valley, where the battle took place. You don’t take a busload of people into the Judean hills in the middle of the summer without having enough water for everyone, and we decided a neat way to accomplish that would be to give souvenir water bottles to our guests.

The design to be printed on the bottles was produced by Deb Houben, who also did our invitations. She’s a fabulous artist and a fabulous graphic designer, and if you need some design work done, you should definitely drop her a line (more info here).

We turned to Google, of course, to find a company to produce the water bottles for us. We ended up at discountmugs.com, which has a huge selection of all different kinds of water bottles at reasonable prices and with easy, straightforward ordering. We ordered our bottles from them after business hours on July 15, and they arrived July 23. I was able to easily watch their progress of our order through a tracking page on their Web site. The end result is exactly what we wanted.

Overall, the experience was extremely positive, and I encourage anyone who is looking to purchase imprinted water bottles or any of the other merchandise that discountmugs.com offers (mugs and water bottles, obviously, plus lots of other stuff) to give them a try.

(Incidentally, for those of you who are familiar with Jewish life and are wondering why my daughter studied a selection from the Prophets for her bat mitzvah rather than a Torah parsha… We belong to an Orthodox synagogue which doesn’t go in for the whole women’s prayer group thing, so reading Torah for her bat mitzvah at our synagogue wasn’t really an option. There are other communities in which we participate where she could have read Torah, but she wasn’t really interested in doing that, and we were comfortable letting her observe her bat mitzvah in a different way that would be meaningful to her.)

JanSport packs have a lifetime warranty.  Following the instructions on the JanSport Web site, I sent the pack in for repair or replacement.  The Web site promised a turnaround time of about two weeks.

About a week and a half later, I got this amusing postcard in the mail:

A couple of days later, about two weeks after I sent it, my backpack arrived, fully repaired, with this card enclosed with it:

It’s a little sad that the quality of customer service in this country has gotten so bad that it is remarkable for a company to have a good warranty and honor it cheerfully and quickly, but there you go.  Thanks, JanSport!

Like just about every other company nowadays, Zipcar has a form on their Web site you can use to send them a message.  However, unlike most other companies, they also publish an actual email address you can use to contact them, whether you’re a customer that.  And unlike just about every large company in the world, real people actually read and respond to those messages in a timely fashion.

You can also reach them on the phone.  It’s easy to get through to a real person, and when you do, the person you’re talking to is actually able to help you. What a concept!

I discovered shortly after joining that if I had enrolled as an MIT alumnus, the application fee would have been waived and the annual membership fee cut in half.  I sent them email and asked: could I switch to the MIT alumni plan; could they refund my application fee; and could they refund half of my original membership fee?  I expected the answers to be no, no and no, or at best yes, no and no, but I received a response less than an hour later indicating that my account had been updated and a credit would appear in the next few days on my credit card for the application fee and half of the membership fee.

I sent some suggestions to them by email about car features, and I got back a detailed response (>1000 words!).  Much of it was explanations of why some of my suggestions were unworkable, but the person who responded took the time to explain why they were unworkable in a way that made perfect sense, rather than just ignoring me or sending a generic “we will take your suggestions into consideration.”

These examples make it obvious that Zipcar is one of the few large companies nowadays who actually understand how to provide exemplary customer service.  On top of all that, of course, is the fact that the service they’re providing is incredibly cool!

P.S. If you’re not a Zipcar member and you want to try it out, email me and I’ll send you a referral, and we’ll both get $25 in free driving!

A nifty little item that my wife bought a few years ago, Skip Hop’s “Pronto” diaper changing kit in denim, has turned out to be such an amazingly useful and high-quality product that I feel I must recommend it to others.

In a nutshell, the pronto gives you a large, comfortable changing pad that can be wiped clean; a container for wipes; pockets for wipes, diapers, cream, etc. as well as extra pockets for pacifiers, keys, wallet, phone, or whatever; a nice little carrying handle; and a clip-on strap you can put around your wrist or hang on your stroller, all in a nifty little package that rolls up and fastens closed easily.

Diaper bags wear out, but this one just doesn’t seem to.  We’ve had it for several years, and it looks as new as the day we got it.  The changing pad hasn’t cracked, faded or become discolored, all of the pockets and zippers are intact, and not a single stitch of the sewing that holds everything together has become undone.  We did have to replace the wipes container when one of its hinges broke, but this doesn’t bother me at all, considering that I keep a stash of several such containers because their nature is to get lost or break all the time.

If you’re at the stage in parenthood where a huge diaper bag is necessary to carry all the items you consider essential when you go out with baby, then the Pronto isn’t for you.  But if, like us, you can sometimes make do with a few diapers, some wipes and a changing pad, then I can’t recommend this product enough.

I haven’t tried any of Skip Hop’s other products, but since small companies tend maintain a similar level of quality throughout their product line, I suspect that their other stuff is top-of-the-line as well.

Greetings,

I want to commend the performance of the cashier, [name elided], who rang up my groceries last night.

I bought three bags of pizza dough.  While ringing up my groceries, he checked each of the bags carefully and noticed that there was some discoloration in the dough in one of them.  He brought this to my attention, and I was able to go back to the refrigerated case and get a replacement.

When I got back to the checkout aisle, I noticed that he was checking my eggs to make sure that none of them were broken.

I was impressed by, and grateful for, [name elided]‘s conscientiousness.

At least, we did until recently, when the Jumbo packs suddenly disappeared from the shelves, leaving only the smaller “Mega” size, whose per-diaper cost is 11% higher.

After noticing that there were no Jumbo packs in two separate visits to CVS, I asked the night supervisor what was up.  She said that if there were still prices for the Jumbo packs on the shelf, then they were just out of stock, but if the prices had been removed from the shelf, then they’d been discontinued.  I went back to the shelf and checked, and indeed the prices of the Jumbo packs were gone from the shelf.

I went home and sent a complaint to CVS through their Web site.  I explained that we buy the larger packs to save money, that we spend over $500 per year on diapers, and that if they don’t bring back the Mega packs, we’ll have no choice but to stop buying diapers from CVS.

 Today, I got back this incredible response from a CVS district manager:

Mr. Kamens,

Thank you for taking the time to contact us in regards to the availability of the “Mega” pack size of diapers. We have in fact discontinued the “Mega” pack size of diapers however; they are being replaced by the box count diapers which is an even better value than the Mega size. Unfortunately this product will not be available until the beginning of October. In the mean time I would like to offer you the Jumbo Pack size diaper for the same per diaper price you were paying when purchasing the Mega size package. This would bring the price for the Jumbo pack to $10.79.

I will contact the store to make them aware of this. I would also suggest that you bring a copy of this email to authorize the sale price.

Also as a token of my apologies for the inconvenience I will be sending you out a $10.00 CVS Gift card and you should be receiving this in the next 7 – 10 days.

Nicely played, CVS!

[name elided]
Hotel Manager
Hartford Marriott Downtown

Dear Mr. [name elided],

I am writing to compliment your hotel and its staff for a wonderful recent stay by my family.

We were driving home from New Jersey to Boston on Friday, August 21. We are observant Jews, so we do not drive on the Sabbath from Friday evening until Saturday night. Unfortunately, there was a lot of unexpected traffic on that day, and as we drove through Hartford, we realized that we were not going to make it home in time for the start of the Sabbath. With less than an hour to spare before the start of the Sabbath, we pulled off of the highway and began to look for a place to stay.

I called a few hotels and found a reasonable rate at the Marriott. We drove right over there, and I explained the situation to the desk clerk (unfortunately, I didn’t get his name, but I believe he was the manager on duty, since he was wearing a different uniform than the other clerks) – we needed two rooms for 1½ days, we couldn’t use any electricity during our stay, etc. He was very helpful in getting us into our rooms quickly and in listening to our needs and doing his best to accommodate them.

One thing, in particular, impressed me a great deal. Although I did not mention anything about the elevators, when the clerk was looking for rooms for us, he said, “I assume that since the electronic room keys are a problem, you won’t be able to use the elevators. The lowest rooms I have available are on the 6th floor. Is that OK?” I was extremely impressed that he realized on his own that the elevators would be a problem.

We asked for a refrigerator in our rooms to store the food we had brought with us for the trip, as well as for a crib for our 1-year-old. We were impressed by the fact that both the refrigerator and crib got to our rooms almost before we did.

When we were getting settled in our rooms, we discovered several unusual items that we needed to get our hands on before the Sabbath (e.g., a can opener, some pieces of aluminum foil), and your staff was very accommodating about bringing them up to our rooms quickly.

Alas, the can opener wasn’t the right kind, so we were stuck with some cans of tuna fish that we couldn’t open ourselves, but again, your staff came to the rescue – I brought the tuna down to Vivo on Saturday afternoon and a member of your staff there quickly and kindly opened them for us.

It also bears mentioning that the accommodations themselves were very nice. Our rooms were nicely equipped, clean, and in excellent condition, as were all of the public spaces we saw.

Although our experience at your hotel was positive in nearly every way, there is one suggestion I’d like to ask you to consider. It would be very nice if there were a couple of rooms on each floor whose doors could be opened with a key instead of or in addition to an electronic key card, to accommodate guests like us who cannot use electronic key cards on the Sabbath.

Please convey my thanks and gratitude to your staff for a job well done.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

I found two to consider: LogicMail, which is free, and Tiggit Mail, which costs $30.  Both are under active development.  I evaluated them and found them both to be inadequate.

I sent feedback to the authors of both applications describing the bugs I’d encountered and the missing functionality which I felt was essential.  The Tiggit issue list was significantly longer than the LogicMail list, ~20 items vs. ~5, and I really didn’t expect a fast or substantive response from the author.

To my surprise, he responded the same day: “Thank you for this very useful list of issues… I am happy to extend your trial period until such time as the defects are resolved… It is very helpful to get honest feedback like this, and if there are any other thoughts you have, please don’t hesitate to email.”

With this, he and I started a discussion which has continued for over a month.  Our exchanges spanned several beta releases of the application, each of which addressed more of the issues I’d reported.

Yesterday, I installed the most recent beta and found to my delight that all of the issues that I considered showstoppers were fixed.  This didn’t stop me from sending the author a laundry list of previously reported issues that still weren’t fixed and several new issues as well , but since all the major ones were fixed, I went ahead and purchased a license, as I’d promised the author I would do as soon as I felt the application was useable.

A few hours later, Paypal notified me that my license fee had been refunded.  I wrote to the author and asked him what was up, and he responded, “I could not take the money after all the constructive feedabck you have given.  The license is of course yours, free of charge as a token of my appreciation.  I hope tiggit will serve you well, and you will continue to provide helpful comments.”

With his prompt, courteous, and effective response to my feedback, the author of Tiggit Mail transofmred my initial, negative experience into a positive one.  He took my feedback seriously, recognized and acknowledged the validity of my concerns, and addressed them quickly.  He made it clear that he values his customers and understands that the point of what he’s doing is to make them happy.  Finally, refunding my license fee was a perfect example of what Jeffrey Gitomer talks about in Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless: when trying to turn around a dissatisfied customer, always give the customer more than he expects.

I heartily recommend Tiggit Mail to anyone who is looking for an IMAP client for the BlackBerry.  It’s well worth the $30 license fee, even if you don’t receive a refund.

My experience in the past with third-party FSA administrators has ranged from mediocre to bad.  However, this time I’m writing to give kudos, because when I went today to submit my first claim through PayFlex’s self-service Web site, I discovered that they have an intelligent, well-designed, innovative claim submission process, the kind that makes you say, “Why the heck can’t everybody do things this way?”

When you log into the Web site and click “Express Claims”, you are immediately brought to a screen where you enter the details of each charge you’re submitting (expense type, date, amount).  The data entry form is intuitive and responsive, and it doesn’t make you fill out the fields that aren’t needed.

When you’re done and click “Submit”, you are brought to a confirmation screen where you can review all of the information you entered and go back to correct any mistakes.

This is cool.  You are entering your data directly into their database, which means that transcription errors and data-entry delays are eliminated.  Furthermore, since they don’t have to pay people to do data entry, their costs are presumably lower, and one would hope that the cost savings is passed on to my employer in the form of lower administrative fees.

But that’s not even the coolest thing.  Once you confirm that all of the information is correct, you arrive at the receipt submission screen.  They offer you the choice between faxing in your receipts and uploading them as a PDF file produced by a scanner. Since scanners are common nowadays and pretty much every scanner can produce PDFs, uploading a PDF is less trouble for many people than faxing.  Furthermore, the uploaded file is linked immediately and automatically to the claim, once again reducing both delays and processing costs.

Of course, PayFlex also offers the option of filling out a claim form on paper and submitting it by mail or fax, so people who don’t feel comfortable using the online process can still submit claims.

For more information about PayFlex’s claim submission process, see their FAQ page.

Nice job, PayFlex!

UPDATE: I received an explanation of benefits from PayFlex via email, indicating that my claim had been paid, less than 15 hours after I filed my claim. Wow!