OK, it's official. I love Neiman Marcus! At least, I love their customer service. For Christmas '06 my wife gave me this cool desktop weather station that Neiman Marcus was selling. It's a retro kind of design - a dome that houses a thermometer, hygrometer, and barometer - that looks almost steampunkish.

Anyway, this device sat on my desk for a few months before I noticed that the barometer hardly moved. So, in the middle of last year I called Neiman Marcus and requested a replacement as the device had obviously never worked properly. The customer service representative suggested that I should see if a local jeweler could fix it and they would pick up the tab. A short time ago I finally got the device back unfixed (the jeweler was unwilling to mess with it) so I called Neiman Marcus back.

The customer service representative I spoke with this time said “sorry,” but they only allowed returns within three months of purchase. I finally spoke with a supervisor who said that of course she could help me and credited my wife’s account for most of the cost of the device (the alternative, a return and full refund would have taken a long time and a lot of internal stuff at Neiman Marcus, so it was easier all around to do it that way).

Of course, I will forever be looking at a partially functioning weather station which, given my particular form of OCD, may well drive me insane but that’s another matter.

What struck me about this tale is that to get what you want out of customer service you have to know how to work the system. Had I listened to the second customer service representative I spoke to I wouldn’t be writing this piece.

Here’s the thing, Neiman Marcus is obviously an exception in the world of customer service, and few companies have the resources (and margins) to be as responsive. So what are you doing about customer service? What level of customer satisfaction are you aiming for?

If you are like many Web-centric companies you’ll have a Web form or you’ll accept e-mail requests. If you are like many companies you’ll respond with canned pseudo answers generated by a ‘bot,’ which you hope will either answer the question or discourage the customer from asking any more questions.

Well, you can carry on that way but here’s the problem you face: As the competitive landscape gets tougher (which is exactly what is happening in the Web applications world due to the current wave of innovation we’re seeing) bad customer service will eventually make you irrelevant to your marketplace. The worst part of providing poor or bad customer service online is that as the Web becomes evermore social you will get talked about. Remember, online everyone can hear your customers scream.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.