Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong. DONALD PORTER
One of our many lines is pre packaged tubs of candy floss and popcorn which we sell quite a lot of. The product itself is quite inexpensive, however it is very bulky and consequently expensive to post to our customers. Because of this we try many different parcel companies, always trying to find the best and most cost effective form of transporting our product to our customer. Recently we came across a new company we hadn't used, this is called INTERLINK. They were able to beat all of our existing couriers by a comfortable margin, especially where multiple boxes going to the same address was concerned. The reason they are so cheap is because they are no bloody good.
On Thursday we booked a set of parcels in to be collected and delivered overnight to an address in North Wales. Unfortunately the parcel was not collected on Thursday. Now this is something which happens frequently with every firm we have ever used. I consequently went on to Interlinks website to register this problem. There is however no telephone contact number, you have to fill in an email form. I duly did this and received the answer that my query was being passed to the relevant department. That was on Friday morning, by Saturday I had still heard nothing and so repeated the process, receiving another confirmation that the relevant department would contact me. We are now on Monday, some 5 days after the parcel was due to be collected and it is still sitting on my office floor, so I have again tried to contact Interlink, guess what, the relevant department is going to get in touch with me!
The parcel has now been booked in with another delivery firm, so I will see how they do, in the meantime I have requested a refund from Interlink and am now timing exactly how long they are going to take from my initial email to when they actually contact me, as I think they are on course to set some kind of customer service record. I don't as the title of this piece states, expect Interlink to be perfect, but I do expect customer services to get in touch with me in under a week, especially when the product they are selling is overnight delivery!
Contrast this with my experience of another customer service department. We purchased a DELL laptop for my daughter for Christmas. A few days ago she told me that it was not charging up. Upon examination, where she had repeatedly pulled the charging plug out by the cable instead of the plug, the strain relief had come apart and a wire pulled out of the plug. I visited Dells website to order a new charger, however the array of possible options left me a little confused. So rather that ordering the wrong product I contacted their live chat helpline. A very friendly young lady based in the States contacted me within seconds, and after a few minutes debate informed we that as the product wasn't very old they would replace it for me free of charge. Not only that but it would be delivered overnight. Right enough the next morning it rolled up before lunch. About an hour later I received a phone call from customer services at Dell UK to check that I had received the charger and that it as working correctly.
Guess which of the 2 companies above I am more likely to use again.
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