Now That's Customer Service!

I've been trying to buy the "Impeach Remove Jail" t-shirt from Viggo Mortensen's Perceval Press for several months. Every time I try to place an order, they are out of stock. I'm not sure that's because of the sentiment or because of who's selling it, but either way it's a great slogan. So, on Thursday, I noticed the shirts were available again and I attempted to order one in long sleeves and one in the new pink color in short sleeves.

The site had several places where it warned customers to it the send button only once, lest they be charged for duplicate sales. Unfortunately, when I clicked the button, I got an error message. I tried fixing things twice more with the same results (insanity would be expecting a different result, I guess), so then I went in search of the information to contact the company to ask what was going on and make sure that six shirts weren't in the mail.

I can understand why it's a little hard to find an e-mail address to actually contact the company, but I finally managed to find it--no hot link there--and I sent off a short e-mail explaining the problem. Much to my amazement, used as I am to never hearing a response to queries I send to on-line companies (why hasn't that bra company answered my question yet?), I got an e-mail from a nice person named Walter within minutes.

Walter told me that had changed servers only the day before and they were having some problems, but if I tried again, thing should be o.k. Also, not one of the three orders had gone through, so my credit card was safe. I tried to place the order again, and got the same error message. I immediately let Walter know and THEN he wrote back to say that they were trying to get in touch with their tech person and that he would e-mail me as soon as he knew things were working again. He also assured me they had plenty of shirts in stock.

The next morning when I checked my e-mail, there was an e-mail from Walter assuring me things were working and I was able to place my order. On Saturday--that's yesterday, the day after I placed the order--the shirts arrived. Now that's great customer service.