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In an age where everyone seems to complain about poor customer service, I’ve had two really great experiences in the past two weeks.

First, my white iPhone 3GS developed a small crack around the silence switch. It was odd because I kept the phone in a case, never dropped it, didn’t see any other signs of wear on it, and rarely used the silence switch.

I went to my local Apple Store expecting to be told the crack wasn’t covered under warranty (and perhaps for it to be implied that I had dropped the iPhone). To my surprise, an Apple Genius handed me a replacement within a few minutes of looking at the phone. (Interesting side note, the Genius shined some sort of UV light down the iPhone’s audio-out port. Apparently Apple can tell if an iPhone has been submerged in water that way. Not that mine had.)

Next, my Kindle 2 has been resetting on me daily lately. Restoring to factory settings hasn’t helped. It’s a strange problem that I haven’t seen many others report and I can’t reproduce the problem at will. So, when I called up Amazon I expected a refusal to replace the Kindle or some sort of run-around. Again to my surprise, Amazon quickly offered to replace the Kindle free of charge under warranty. It’s coming next-day air and Amazon is paying shipping both ways.

I feel like both of these are examples of big companies with big brands that really get the concept of brand promise. Brand promise isn’t just marketing and it isn’t just product. It’s also how you treat customers at every stage of interaction. I already adored these two companies and their products. (I even own a little stock in both.) But, I’ve now been so pleased with how they’ve treated me from a support standpoint that I’m blogging about it. I wish every company treated all of its customers this well all the time.