Oh Brother how fab art thou?

Oh Brother how fab art thou? The normally excellent Brother HL 4040CN laser printer here in the Morgan PR office has been problematic - dark smudges and inkspots were making printed pages look awful.

We were worried about what the customer service would be like trying to track down help for a printer that was by mere days, more than 12 months old. You hear horror stories of lives wasting away on hold to premium rate numbers in distant lands...

We test customer service through our mystery shopping services, including telephone mystery shopping and video mystery shopping and while we do find many good examples, it is often the case that the bigger the company the worst the customer service will be!

We need not have worried. We contacted Misco, who we bought the printer from last year, and they we happy to help and immediately connected us to a Brother helpline - where a very patient man talked us through taking the machine apart and cleaning it - and he was suitably impressed to discover we had actually already done this after reading about in the manual - sometimes it pays to RTFM!

Anyway, he talked us through cleaning it more and we discovered one of the print cartridges appeared to be leaking. Luckily we had a replacement and with that in place it was all working - and all this in about 10 minutes chatting to very nice man from Brother!

And there was more - as the print cartridge was made by Brother, he supplied us with a address to send it back to them where they will explore what went wrong - and they would then supply us with a replacement.

How about then for excellent customer service? Good public relations too - much of PR is about getting people talking about you and not only have we blogged, it has been mentioned in emails and we'll Twitter about it too.

The icing on what has been a most delicious cake will be if Brother spot this blog or the Twitter postings - that would be truly remarkable customer service if they are monitoring the blogosphere for issues good or bad!