A lot of times in business (and employment for that matter) we get so caught up in our vision (or our job) that we sometimes totally ignore the customer’s viewpoint. I recently had a horrific experience with a certain computer company upon ordering a laptop from them. Once I had decided to buy, I was so excited that I promptly did an insane amount of research and analysis on picking the one I wanted. I do a lot of online shopping, and since I have a background in computers, I know what I’m looking for and generally don’t need any assistance. After a few days, I found the one I wanted at a good price and put my order in online with no issues. It was great, or so I thought.
Over the next few days I kept checking my order status and about 2 days after my order it showed that my order was “Canceled.” I hadn’t canceled the order, and the charge still showed up on my credit card. Obviously, I was wondering what was going on, so I decided to give them a call. After finding the 800 number and waiting on the line for about 20 minutes I got a chance to speak to someone. Upon telling them of my issue they promptly asked me for my order number, which I provided, and then they said “oh this was a small business order, I’ll need to transfer you over to that department.” I quickly told them that it shouldn’t be a small business order because I’m not a small business. I ordered it as a regular customer. The rep then told me that it was in their system as a small business order so I would have to speak to them regardless since she didn’t have access to it in her system.
I waited a little longer and finally got to the other department. They notified me that the order showed canceled in their system, but that they didn’t know why. After a few minutes of me telling how ridiculous it was that they don’t know why something is canceled, they told me that in order to find that out, they’d have to transfer to me another department. I couldn’t believe it. I angrily complied and proceeded to wait. After about 10 minutes I heard a ringing noise promptly followed by two beeps and a click. Yup, you guessed it, they hung up on me. At this point I was seriously outraged and feel sorry for anyone who was in a 50 feet radius from me because they probably got an earful of stuff they weren’t prepared for. I had spent 50 minutes on the phone with this company, I got transferred 3 times, and still didn’t know why my order was canceled and what was going on.
The events of the story up to this point are already bad, but little did I know it was going to get much worse before it got any better. Check out the rest of the story tomorrow!
February 16th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Oh this is a really good cliffhanger. I do hope you tell us the name of the on-line company you ordered from.
I hope to be back tomorrow for the rest of the story, if not please stop by my blog and remind me. Thanks.
February 17th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Hey Debo, actually the company was Dell. I like their computers and think you can get great deals at their Dell Outlet…but this experience was just awful. Their customer service is notoriously bad, and I probably saw the worst of it.