Sorry, a bit of a rant. I went to a trade show last week and picked up a couple truck loads of catalogs and brochures. I know it's probably not typical, but I'm frustrated by a couple of customer service experiences. I won't name names, but I have a couple of examples to rant about.
I was enquiring about a piece of equipment and the guy asks if he can swipe my card. Takes my card, goes and talks to another customer. meanwhile, another rep comes over, starts talking to us, and we tell him what we do and plan to do, and he recommends a model. After being gone for about 15 minutes with my card, the guy comes back, hands me the card, and the other guy says "I recommended model XYZ" and the guy says "Yeah, that would be perfect".
What? Perfect for who? For what application? He hadn't heard a single sentence about what we would use it for or how much we'd use it.
Made me a little mad, and I decided I wouldn't buy a machine from that guy if he were giving them away.
So I get back, I'm looking at a couple of catalogs and materials and I find a place that seems to have good pricing and carry most of what I was interested in trying out. So I decided to place about a $200 order with them (not a big order, but $200 is $200). I go to their website- no online catalog. Okay, fair enough but how about entering 2002, like the rest of the world?
I call the number and the lady tells me that I have to fill out a form first, and she'll fax it to me. She tells me that they can't process it that day, as the girl who sets up new accounts isn't there today. So, she faxes it, I get it, start filling it out, and they are asking questions on the form that I don't think they need to know. Information like a detailed map to our location. For what? How many employees, how long we've been in business, what are our hours, approximate building size,etc.
How's that got anything to do with me placing an order and paying by credit card? I'm not trying to set up a credit line with them, I'm trying to order something and pay for it at the time of sale. How do you figure you need a detailed map to my office in order to sell me a piece of material? How's the square footage of my office have anything to do with me placing an order? I don't get it, and they lost my business for two reasons- one they couldn't take my order that day, and two because they were asking for information they didn't need to complete my order.
So, I head on to my next venture. I saw a piece of material I was interested in (which I planned to buy from the above source), the guy showed examples of it being lasered, but never vector cut. It looked like something we would use, but I didn't want to order a ton of it prior to knowing whether or not it would vector cut.
I search the internet, find another place that stock it and it gives a price for 1-9, I order 6 sheets of it and think we're all fine.
Come in today, find an email from them telling me they only ship that material in 10 or more. What? Then why do you have the price for 1-9 units on your website? Why was I allowed to even order them? (I did up the order to 10 in order to get them).
Have I lost my mind or have people stop caring about customer service these days? I know there there are people out there who bend over backwards to make their customers experiences good ones (myself included). I'll go out of my way to make my customers happy. Sadly, it seems people out there, and they are reasonable size companies, don't have any intention of giving good customer service.
Sorry for the rant, but some people need to wake up and be exposed to some customer service training.
::::climbing down off my soap box now::::::