The Wall Street Journal
Magsformiles.com is a website that lets you subscribe to print editions of various newspapers and magazines paid for by your airline miles. Thirty six hundred odd miles would get you almost a year long supply of Wall Street Journal, for example, six days a week. Since some workflow would be involved between miles being deducted from your airline mileage account to the publisher accepting the order, the order confirmation page notes that it could take 4-6 weeks for the first issue to arrive.
When my parents were visiting us from India this year, I utilized some of my miles to order subscriptions to some magazines and newspapers including Time, Fortune, Economist and WSJ for my father’s consumption. Anyway it’s not always easy to use miles for travel either because of block out dates or some other varied inflexible circumstances, where else could they be better utilized.
Instead of waiting 4-6 weeks for the first paper to arrive, I simultaneously ordered WSJ from their website by paying actual money instead of miles. This meant that two orders for WSJ had been placed – one using my hard or hardly earned miles and the other using the hard earned money. I expected the latter subscription to start the next business day onwards which it very well did, and also expected that a few weeks down the line there would arrive a day when the miles subscription would kick in and two papers will be delivered. That would be the day when I would go online and cancel the paid WSJ subscription which was essentially a stop gap arrangement.
The other magazines started getting delivered fairly sooner. However many weeks passed by and the dual WSJ paper delivery day did not arrive. I decided to call their customer service to know what was going on. After I had explained my game plan in detail, the agent on the phone looked up my account history and informed me that they did receive both orders, and instead of fulfilling both orders, they linked them because the delivery address was same! WSJ anticipated what I would have done or would have wanted them to do. They could have very well started to fulfill both orders but they chose to do what was best for the customer instead of acting for short term business gain.
That is one of the best examples of customer service I have come across in a long time, and I was left as impressed by WSJ the company as I have been with WSJ the paper.