Denrael

Only two things in life are inevitible, death and taxes. Personally the jury is still out on death, but so far I’ve not been able to avoid taxes. This weekend I am spending enjoying the govenment’s version of S&M, doing one’s taxes. I defy any Dom to come up with a more torturous session than being forced to dig through arcane tax laws.

At one point in my life, I thought about having my taxes done. My father had passed away and my mom had sold the family home and moved to a new state. What better time to have the professionals jump in and help out. After having her taxes expertly prepared, then having them reviewed by a “tax expert” in her new state, I decided to review them. With little effort, I found several errors and ended up spending far more time going back, getting them fixed than I would have if I had stated myself. From that day on, I’ve religiously done them myself.

That being said, I, like many people use tax preperation software. In my case, the product of choice is TurboTax which I have used for a number of years. If I stay away from the super mega deluxe versions, it’s not too bloated and it seems to do a good job of preparing the forms. Of course I still review everything myself, but just the administrivia of having the forms filled in and printed makes this a bit less like what I imagine the sensation of someone dripping hot wax on freshly whipped skin. (Yes, I really hate doing taxes).

This year, I was rapidly moving thru the first set of taxes and hit a snag. I got to the state tax part, and TurboTax refused to go on. I had already downloaded my state, but TurboTax seemed intent on making me download it again before I could continue. If I agreed and let it try to download it, the program would warn me it was there already. If I overrode it, it would quit. No matter what I tried, I could not move forward into state taxes.

So, saying to myself: “self, maybe there is something worse than taxes, it’s needing to deal with support while doign taxes.” Reluctantly I hit the help key in TurboTax, seeing what my support options were. First I tried community. Maybe this has happened to someone else. I did find my exact symptom that someone else had experienced, but no solution listed. Failing that, I looked at my next two options. Contact by chat (10 minutes), or voice (45 minutes). Ok, I figured I’d try chat first.

Miracle Begins Here

I selected their chat option, entered my name, email and problem description. Within 1 minute, I was connected to Angelica, my personal heroine. She read the problem description I had entered, asked me 3 intelligent questions, isolated the fix, gave me a download and waited while I installed and tested it. Total elapsed time: under 10 minutes. All this while maintaining a sense of humor and making me feel like she was genuinely concerned about making sure I was happy and working.

End of Miracle

Those that know me, know that I am passionate about customer service. The old adage that it is 5 times more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one is only half the story. The other half is what happens when your service level is so outstanding that you can move customers to raving fans. It wasn’t anything magical, not really, it was a very talented professional, doing her job to the best of her ability.

Thank you Angelica and Thank you TurboTax for making my “session” a bit less painful.