Customer Service You Can Keep

When we ordered our new cooker we were delighted with our purchase. We had been shopping around for a few weeks and had found a stylish piece of equipment with all the features we needed. We were also pleased with the helpful and friendly attitude of the salesman, even when we declined to pay for the extended warranty.

The one cloud on the horizon was that when I got home, I discovered that I had lost my wallet. I phoned the store and was told nothing had been handed in. I took up the invite to leave my telephone number in case the wallet turned up. This may seem an unrelated diversion from the story, but read on.

At the time of ordering our cooker we were having our kitchen refitted, so a quick delivery was important to us. We were, therefore, delighted that an early delivery could be arranged. Indeed the cooker was duly delivered on the arranged date. So, apart from my lost wallet we were pretty happy. However, this was not to last.

We had made our purchase from a branch of one of the large electrical chains and had been warned against them from friends who'd had bad experiences in the past. There were no such problems for us. Or so we thought until the cooker was fitted.

It didn't work! In fact it blew the fuses in our house.

In our naivety we phoned the store expecting apologies and more importantly some help. Instead, they told us that as we had taken delivery of the cooker it was no longer their problem. The manufacturers guarantee applied and we would have to contact them direct. In fact, they went so far as to suggest that the problem was of our own making for not buying the extended warranty.

Can you guess what happened when we phoned the manufacturer?

Well, they told us to go back to the retailer!

After several phone calls it became clear that neither the manufacturer or the retailer were keen to take responsibility for the situation. This was not very impressive bearing in mind we had spent over £600 to buy the cooker.

Eventually manufacturer and retailer talked to each other and agreed to send an engineer to look at the cooker. If it could not be repaired they would replace it.

A date was agreed for the inspection and I took a day off work for the occasion. The engineer did not turn up. There followed another round of conversations which culminated in a splendidly rude lady saying that no appointment had been booked and that this was all my fault. My attempts to get an early re-arranged appointment failed and it was another couple of weeks before the engineer arrived.

The fault turned out to be minor and was easily fixed. We now have a perfectly good working cooker and we are happy with it.

We are not quite so happy with the service we received. We are not naïve enough to think that things never go wrong. We do, however, think that it is reasonable for suppliers to take responsibility for the situation when this happens.On this occasion it took countless phone calls from us and several weeks of waiting to have this problem sorted out.

Most of the people we dealt with were helpful and friendly, but they were just not effective or interested in sorting out my problem. If this is customer service you can keep it.

Now the good news is that my wallet has finally turned up. I few days ago I got a letter from a local police station saying that my wallet had been handed in to them. When I went to collect it I asked who handed it in. They told me that it had been posted, accompanied by a compliment slip addressed from the store where I had bought the cooker. It had only taken them 8 months to get around to doing this. Like me, you may be wondering why they didn't just phone me as they had promised.

Oh Well! Lesson learned. Next time we need electrical goods, we'll try Comet's or John Lewis. There is one place we will not be going back to.

If you are looking for customer service training materials please check my 'Good Bad and Ugly Customer Service' course. Only available at Trainer Bubble.

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