Since March is the month of good service and praising good customer service practitioners, it seems only appropriate to cover the topic here as well. Especially since I have some new stories to share.
Shall we start with bad service!?
I am lucky to live in a country where most things can be ordered online, payment is fast and can even be done by phone often. And, we can track the goods moving towards us with minute-level precision, not to mention that most things arrive the next day – sometimes even sooner. Last week, however, a big furniture store chain, reminded me that I am spoiled and things can be way worse.
We wanted to buy a new couch. Nothing complicated, just a bed/couch for our new guestroom. We chose a model online that came in many colours and it was a new model so we were quite sure that they will have it in stock and it is just up to us when we’d like to go and get it. Or in worst case, we would have to wait a couple of weeks. Which would have been fine as well.
And in reality? We rented a car to go get it from a shop only to discover that they didn’t have a single one in stock. Not even in the default colour. If we would have however placed an order, then we could have had it in 58-65 days, but not even that deadline was guaranteed.
We then looked through their long list of shops – one by one because that was the only option on their website – and we checked all colours that would have been acceptable to us only to discover that in the whole greater Stockholm area, there is exactly one couch in store – of course on the other side of the city. And it was not possible to order online a couch from a specific shop. Therefore we drove across town, hoping that no-one else gets there first.
We managed to buy it but not yet get it as it wouldn’t have fit in our rental car anyway. Therefore we had to order home delivery and keep in mind that we could only do it in person in the shop.
The couch was needed in about a month, no later and preferably not before either. Unfortunately that was not an option either. We could choose one of the next three workdays and the conditions were that even though they will call us 30 minutes ahead, we needed to have two people home all day to carry it up from the front door. Me and my boyfriend both work 10 minutes from our home, but yet we were still told to both stay home. Thankfully he could. I didn’t. And of course the guys didn’t call 30 minutes ahead but rather 15. Which was enough for me to get home.
Now the couch lies still in plastic in our kitchen, waiting for us to move and we got it in time which was the most important part but I keep wondering, could they really not improve the whole service!? How many people know to order their couch 2-3 months before they actually need it? And is it really fair with today’s communication technology to make someone just take a day off work?
On the other hand I was seriously impressed with Batteriexperten’s service. I managed to drop my laptop on the ground and injure the charger. We found a new suitable one from the webshop mentioned above. I placed an order and the new one came to my mailbox in a couple of days. Unfortunately that too was broken or so I thought. Therefore I called their customer service and told them about my issue. I
only gave them my name – no order IDs etc – and already during our short call I received two emails, confirming registration of issue and offering a solution.
Without any annoying questions or suggesting that I might be doing something wrong myself, they kindly offered to return my money or ship a new one as fast as possible. In addition to that I was told to test the new one and in case it works, then just to trash the first one. And it worked.
I was so glad that I wasn’t made to feel like an idiot nor to figure out how to ship it back at my own expense.
Do you notice the difference? Guess whom I will be buying things from again. Do you have any good or bad service stories to share?