It has never failed that every time I have walked into the Wells Fargo bank location closest to me that the representative who set up my account, Gabriel, has jumped up from his desk, said hello to me by name, and offered to take me out of line to make my deposit for me. On occasion, he has even filled out the deposit slip because he got to me before I had a chance to. Total time to complete customer satisfaction: 5 minutes.
It has never failed over the last six months that I have had trouble mounting and charging my (now seven years old) iPod. I couldn't quite diagnose what the problem was, but scheduled an appointment at the Apple store today to find out when it stopped charging completely. In two minutes, Ray had faulted the cable and gave me a brand new one out of a drawer. Total time to complete customer satisfaction: 10 minutes.
I would be okay standing in line for a few minutes at a busy bank branch or paying for a new connector cable; I really would be. But a fifty-cent cable was all it took to convince me once again that Apple has some of the best customer support in the world and how foolish I would be to think about buying (or building) a new PC for my next computer. And a five foot walk every other week is all it takes to make me proud to be a Wells Fargo customer and convince me I made the right decision when evaluating banks, even when the customer service couldn't really be factored into a comparison on interest rates and packages and ATMs and locations.
But no matter what comparisons you make, good customer service makes all the difference.