Greetings all,
It has been far too long since the last blog, so I have a made a commitment to myself that I will be jotting down my thoughts on a more regular basis. I have material for about 15 blogs at the moment, but I thought that I would go with something timely… two crappy stories that fall under the general category of a complete lack of customer service.
The title for the blog was stolen from a pizza place here in LoDo. They have it hanging on a sign at the cash register and it gave us a good laugh because, ironically, they actually have great service at this pizza place. They are a bit unconventional and walk to the beat of their own drum in there (I believe that there is both a music trivia test and a minimum number of piercings requirement for employment, but man can they make a good pie.) Little did I know when we got a chuckle about this sign that it would come into play a couple of times in the week that followed.
First instance is about a business owner that is either completely lacking in customer service skills, has no desire for repeat business, doesn’t care about his clients or some lethal combination of the three. So, here’s the situation – We purchased online from a store called Art Supplies Wholesale in Mass. Our purchase, not a big one, was for 14 canvases 12″x12″ that we were to use, in conjuction with art created by Ashley, to decorate our front hall. We ordered the items online, received shipping confirmations and arrived home from Mexico (more on that trip another time) to find a big sealed box from them in our loft. Knowing that we weren’t doing the project until Ashley arrived last weekend, the box sat unopened until the night before her arrival.
When we opened it, there were only 12 canvases. The packing slip shows that there were 14, but after counting and recounting them numerous times, there were only 12. Not to worry, De Ann busted out the computer and sent an email to them, alerting them to the situation. A couple of days later, she received a call from someone following up, but she didn’t have any of the information with her when they called, so they said they would look into it and call back. No call for a couple more days, so De Ann placed a call to the company. She was immediately transferred to Bill.
Now, I don’t know whether Bill was off his meds that day, whether his dog had just been run over, but Bill was instantly hostile. He was clearly aware of the situation and the details and jumped all over De Ann saying that he had already spoken to her, so why was she calling back. He made claims that we stole the pieces and were just trying them for free. More claims that there has NEVER been an issue like this at this company, so it must be a theft on our side. Belligerent, insulting, condescending and completely unwilling to let De Ann speak. After several cool-headed attempts to get him to let her speak and to propose some solutions, Bill said that he wouldn’t be doing anything about it. Period. De Ann asked for his name and what his role is with the company. I’m Bill and I own this company.
I’m not sure how Bill stays in business…maybe its solely because of the Internet and that he doesn’t have to see or be around people. That is probably it. So, De Ann indicated that her only recourse would be to talk to her credit card company, to which he responded that she would have to because he wont do anything, and promptly hung up.
Big props to the good folks at American Express. They listened and based on the dollar amount said “no problem, we’ll credit you and remove this from his account. Will there be anything else.” We thought of many devious things we could do to hurt his business, but in the end, we figured that he would likely put himself out of business without anyone’s assistance, so we’ll move on with our day. (Epilogue – so apparently Bill decided to actually resolve the issue of our $9.92 and credited it back to De Ann. We’ll let Amex and Bill work out the double-credit situation, we are done.)
Issue number two. Our apartment/loft complex in LoDo. So apparently, no one in the front office can count, specifically they cant count the number of parking places they have and this has led to the over-sale of “reserved” spaces. So, for the 3rd time since we moved in back in April, they are “redoing the parking”. We received one spot with our unit and then pay monthly for a second spot, all part of our lease agreement. So, they are moving to a system where only the “paid for” second spots are reserved, and the rest of the spaces are “open parking”. So, the question that no one can seem to answer is: If the spaces are oversold, simply making them unassigned does not actually create more parking, does it? How does this alleviate the problem? Very specifically, it just means that the people getting home the latest will most likely be S.O.L for a parking space in a lot that they were promised parking in as part of their lease. When asked about “what do I do if I come home and there are no spaces available?”, the clueless young lady at the front said “that shouldn’t happen.” “Okay, work with me here – you’ve oversold spaces, people will want to park their car, there will be someone that gets left out in the cold. So what happens.” “Don’t worry, that should never happen.”
Subscribing to the axiom of never having a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent, I left the office shaking my head. Good news for me, I’m working from home most days, so I’m putting 20 miles on my car a week and it rarely leaves the garage. Too bad for the other suckers though…
So, those are just the recent stories…. anyone out there have a service nightmare that they would like to share. I’d love some company!
Have a great day people. I’ll be back with something more upbeat in a few days!
-Ron
