Send Appreciation Notes To Companies

I try not to Advocate Stuff too much, but here's a thing I do that I think you should too: when you have a good experience with a big company:

1) search for the primary customer service contact on https://www.elliott.org/company-contacts/
2) send that person an email appreciating the thing

Personally this mostly happens to me with good call center support, but you could really do it with anything.

I think this is valuable because:

a) customer service people get tons of complaints, it's probably genuinely meaningful for them to occasionally have someone email their manager to compliment them instead of complain about them

b) it just feels like cosmically the right thing to do, in a world where (mostly) people only email to complain and never to compliment

c) in some small way, I truly believe that this kind of thing can shape company incentives. I really want companies to invest in e.g. high quality phone-based human-operated customer service, and that's not cheap, and there will inevitably be factions within the company arguing for choosing a cheaper and worse option instead.

In at least some cases, I believe you can meaningfully strengthen the hand of the internal factions who advocate for spending money on better service if you can help them show up to meetings with a slide saying HERE IS AN EMAIL FROM A LITERAL HAPPY CUSTOMER SAYING HOW MUCH THEY APPRECIATE THE EXACT THING I HAVE ADVOCATED SPENDING MONEY ON.

I cannot prove this is true but I think it's how stuff works in the world, and if you want to see more of something you should enable the people who are trying to make it happen. And hey, if it's not-true, the first points still hold anyway.