Posts Tagged ‘customer “service”’
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This Penny Arcade Comic (warning, it has a cuss in it) filled in a hole in my vocabulary of which I was completely unaware. It brought me the delicious phrase ‘register biscuit’ to exactly and perfectly describe the minimum wage earning, incompetent teens who populate the behind-the-counter areas of the local electronics stores. Let me give you a for instance or two, if you have not immediately picked up on what I am laying down.
Before we got married, Amy and I were out shopping for a stereo for her to take to university. We arbitrarily picked Future Shop because they are kind of a big deal when it comes to consumer electronics at the quality and price point we were seeking. They are also apparently on commission though you’d never, ever be able to guess this from their behaviour toward people who are presumably helping pay their wage (more commonly known as “customers”). We walked through the stereo section (having done some research beforehand, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted) and tried to attract the interest of one of the what can only be called staff, due to the fact that they were all wearing matching shirts that had the name of the store emblazoned thereupon. To be fair, we may have happened upon the Future Shop bowling team making a visit to the sponsoring store and sort of huddling around talking to each other and ignoring all other lifeforms in a 30m radius around them. Such is the right and privilege of bowling teams, after all. Perhaps we were being too judgmental of them when we decided to walk through the store and give the sale to whomever made eye contact and/or spoke to us first. I think we ended up with somebody from the music area or possibly games but she was more than happy to ring us through while the bowling team… um… bowled? Maybe?
I’ve had a broadly similar experience to this in Home Depot stores. Similar in that I am getting no service but also different in that there is not an employee to be seen. Generally speaking, when I am headed into a home improvement store, I have a pretty clear idea of what I’m there for and some kind of clue where it is. This is a behaviour born of necessity because Home Depot in particular suffers from tragic underemployment. Rona (kind of a Canadian Home Depot or Lowe’s) is better staffed or has not yet equipped their employees with customer avoidance radar. Rona’s downfall is that their very helpful and friendly employees often don’t know which end of a lightbulb is intended to be screwed into the socket. I was absolutely shocked a couple weeks ago that, while at Home Depot, I was standing in the carpet section after having picked up some tile grout. I was trying to figure out where in the store I would find backer rod to seal up some of the more egregious failures of the bathroom tile and an employee, apropos of nothing whatsoever, asked me if he could help me find something. I was absolutely floored by his presence and willingness to be of assistance. Now, he didn’t know what the thing was I was looking for or even where to begin looking for it, but he seemed to genuinely be interested in helping me.
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To contrast sharply with yesterday’s diatribe against Bell Canada and their horrible everything, I would like to focus today on Canadian Tire, another Canadian Institution with some underlying problems but a very different approach to how to sort them out. They’ve been in business approximately as long as the Hudson’s Bay Company (or since the 1920s, take your pick). They have long succeeded by pairing their low-grade and frankly shoddy merchandise with absolutely sterling customer service.
I have been buying things there for years and years, drawn back time and again, I suspect, by the lure of their specious “Canadian Tire Money” which Americans commonly mistake for our real money due to the bright colouration and low face value. This has more recently stopped being a selling point for me because I buy nearly everything on my credit card nowadays and they don’t offer such trinkets to Visa customers.
Over time, I’ve purchased a number of products there that turned out to be, well, not all that one could hope for. A few years ago I bought a pair of Spalding sandals. They lasted approximately 40 seconds in what I would consider normal use for a pair of ‘sport’ sandals. I jogged out to the field to play some Frisbee (not even ultimate, just ‘toss it back and forth’ style) and as soon as I turned from my straight ahead canter, the side blew completely out of the sandal and I fell over. I took them back, got my money back and went to a real shoe store and bought a legitimate brand name sandal. They worked beautifully for 4 years of very steady wear with nary a problem.
Last summer we decided that Coleman was the way to go for a tent (WRONG). We picked out a Ciqala model, set it up in our living room to make sure that we knew how to go about it and off we went. It turns out that it rains all the time on the East Coast and the number one thing you don’t want when camping (apart from maybe some kind of primitive rain attraction talisman) is a leaky tent. We spent a very damp, cold week down east and on our return, found out that CanTire has a standard 7 day return policy on tents. This would have been very bad had that been printed on our receipt, however, due to some sort of error on the part of the store where we bought the tent, this was not to be found anyplace on the receipt so they gave us our money back despite the fact that the tent was still damp and dirty from our trip.
CanTire’s entire reputation and, I think, business model is predicated on their willingness to accept just about anything as a return. They sell crummy product and they’re aware of the fact so they make it as easy as possible to get some kind of satisfaction when (not if) things go sour. We had a good example of this when we were out at Camp Omagh a couple years ago. It was a terribly hot week. The temperature didn’t get below 30, even at night, for the first three days of the week. We took pity on the children and their melty state and bought some oscillating fans. One of the four we bought didn’t work at all (having only a 25% failure rate is actually pretty good considering how little they cost) and so we were going to take it back in any case, but one of the cabins managed to break their fan by opening a door into it. We decided that we didn’t want a broken fan around so we figured we’d take it back to the store to see if they wanted it for parts or anything. They took it back without even blinking.
I am, even at this present moment, on hold and waiting to talk to a “customer service” representative in the cancellations department. I think it’s a worrying sign not so much when a company like Bell has a specific department to handle cancellations (that’s just realistic based on their business practices), but when the hold wait for that department is in the 10+ minute range.
We’ve been Bell customers since I first moved out, primarily because there weren’t a whole lot of options and until recently it was a pain to switch. Bell Canada was effectively a monopoly for a really, really long time and they haven’t really given up acting like it, despite the fact that there are actually viable alternatives.
They’ve been progressively increasing our rates and either keeping the service the same or in some cases, reducing it (for example when they began filtering BitTorrent traffic) and I have frankly had enough of it. Dealing with their reps has also always been difficult. The automated ‘assistant’ is giving everybody named Emily a bad name. I think they would have significantly fewer verbal assaults on the poor schmucks in India if they did away with the voice prompts. Bell needs to embrace the new generation of users. We are inherently anti-social. We prefer to type. We hate speaking unless it is absolutely necessary. Give us buttons to press. We love buttons. We are extremely comfortable with buttons and their function.
I’ve switched our phone service over to Primus VoIP which gives roughly the same quality of actual phone service, the same rate for long distance and significantly more features for about $15/month as opposed to the $25ish for Bell’s basic ‘you may have a telephone’ service and then another $7 to be able to make long distance calls at $0.05/minute. Our internet provider is TekSavvy. They provide a comparable service to the one Bell was giving us for about $40/month instead of $55. They are very in-tune with their userbase, going so far as to offer semi-official support via the forums at DSL Reports. It does have a cap, which Bell’s didn’t but I can’t imagine that we’ll need over 200GB in any given month and if we do, their overage charges are pretty reasonable. Bell’s comparable service has a slightly faster ‘up to’ speed (which frankly, I doubt anybody has ever actually received) and a 50GB/month cap and the $5/month option of 40GB more.
My last call to Bell was a hair under 15 minutes long, 10 of those minutes spent either arguing with the digital ‘aide’ or on hold. I had to enter my phone number twice with ‘her’ (admittedly this was a time that I just gave up and spelled it out aloud because my button pressing wasn’t registering), then give it to the first guy who picked up (generic customer service), then give it to woman who picked up (home phone department), then give it to the woman in the cancellations department. As soon as I got to the last tier, she got all buddy buddy and tried to win me back.
“Hey, we have some great deals, what is your other provider offering”
“I’d prefer not to say”
*presumably cancellation-related mumbling and clicking going on*
“Did you want to take your phone number with you?”
“No, thank you. Everything else is already set up and working.”
“Well, we can offer some really good long distance rates on-“
“I. DON’T. WANT. IT. I apologize for my rudeness.”
“Oh, uh. That’s fine.”
*more clicking and mumbling, somebody laughing loudly and shouting in some non-English language*
”Will there be anything else today?”
”No, that’s all. Thank you.”
”Thank you for choosing Bell." *click*
The irony of the scripted closing statement is delicious.