Yesterday’s religious experience.

As I’ve mentioned before, a great customer experience can seem as unusual as a religious revelation, so when I experience one, I feel the need to put it on the bloggity record, to counteract the nightmares I’ve been having with Circuit City’s City Advantage, Panasonic, and some used car enterprise in Florida.

I had such a pleasant surprise yesterday at a place called Maple Street Guitars in Atlanta.

I’d taken a guitar in because it went sharp when I played like I meant it, and it was slowly driving me insane. I’d tried to fix it myself by filing the nut, and though that helped, it still wasn’t enough to make it an everyday player.

So the luthier kept it for a week, and to make a long story short, he found the cause (frets needed redressing,) tweaked everything where it should be, and didn’t have to replace the nut. During the weak he stayed in touch by phone to tell me what he’d found and discuss how much work I wanted done. The result is better than I’d hoped.

My generalized takeaway from this particular positive experience is find places where the employees, deep in their souls, actually give a shit about what they do. That’s probably easier to do with a music store than, say, vacuum cleaner repair or, in my experience, car mechanics. But if you can find it, it’s consumer gold.