Poor Service

[saveafish]

(Former aquatic store owner) In the past I have delt with this crew with only the best outcome. At that time I was also running a walkin store. After a year of selling it off my soon to be wife let me have a reef. So I got a 110g and a 180g. I made my order and made a pick-up date. The print out had their old location on it, that is just poor business on their part and had to find their new one. Than when I went in to get the items my soon to be wife gave me, a B-Day present of a grand to spend. (whoohoo a dream come true). When I entered one employee told me to visit the office and when I started back to the office the other said I can't go and I need to wait there. There were both rude as heck. Than a phone call was made to the owner. A funny thing he was too busy to talk to me. It is funny on how they lost a grand in sells today but I am sure they will make it up in a few days. From other unknowning clinets ordering on-line.

(Brandy) I was very upset with my first, only and last time at a store my soon-to-be husband just raved about. The employees were very rude and unhelpful. It was made worse by the fact that I had called on Tuesday to let them know I would be in Wednesday and was not informed than of the move, which was very upsetting.
:mad2: :mad2:
You should treat all customers the same whether
they buy one snail or several thousand dollors worth of products.

 

[SJGreene]

I can't and won't speak to the way you were treated by the store employees because I wasn't there to witness anything first hand.

Regarding the store location, I do know that thier website has the new address all over the place. However, I have never ordered from them on-line and then scheduled a store pick up, so I don't know what would have been on the print out you had.

Sorry you had a bad experience with this business.

 

[jasonfrey]

Hi,

I'm very sorry about the problems you had coming to the store. We did move almost 1 year ago and I thought all places were changed online. The main front page, the intro page, the customer service page that tells you directions to the store, these were all updated with our new address.

The only place that wasn't updated as a confirmation page the order system prints out. We never caught this before and that is updated now. So that was the page you had with our wrong address. So we are sorry about the mistake.

This was certainly not done on purpose and we have corrected the issue as soon as we seen the problem.

As to the me, the owner being too busy to talk to you. That has nothing to do with how much money you are spending. I don't care if someone buys 1 snail or 1000 snails. We do treat all of our customers with the same level of respect and courtesy. I am a busy person, I answer 100 to 200 emails a day, order all the supplies from various suppliers, deal with employee and customer issues. Often I have 2 or 3 people in my office at the same time with issues and I have to deal with, so I can't just stop what I'm doing all the time.

Please also understand we are not open to the public during the week, except for Friday and Saturday walk-in hours. Our main business is mail order. We do all pickups if they are prepaid, so our customer service people can get everything written up and then warehouse guys pull it and have it ready. So if you come in during the week during "closed" retail hours. You are dealing with our warehouse crew, not our customer service department. They are not trained in customer service, although they are generally very friendly and eager to help.

Our local pickups during the week for designed for just that, come in and grab your pre boxed order and that's it. We just do not have the staff to run customer service people during the week out in the warehouse for pickups and walk-ins. It's just not the nature of our business. That's why we dedicate extra resources on Friday and Saturday so we can help everyone on a one to one basis.
As to the confusion where to go to pickup, that is an issue we are resolving. We are trying to make it easier to pickup without going to the office and we do have to block people from coming into the drygoods warehouse. This is for liability and insurance reasons and also we have a fast paced mail order business with a lot of guys running back and fourth shipping packages, fork lifts and other dangers. So it's just not safe or productive to let customers into that area.
That is why we are trying to bring local customers in through the livestock area to by pass drygoods area and the office, so you only have one place to go for pickup and also that area is a lot more fun to watch for everyone.
I hope that helps explain how our business runs. Your business is valuable to us and we hate to see you unhappy and hope you come back, but we understand why you are upset and do apologize for the address issue and not having a pleasant experience when you stopped by.

 

[saveafish]

I am sorry that you feel you had to make excuses for your employees. Wheather they are trained in customer service or not there is such a thing as common curtous, none of which we experienced. As for the address that is some what understandable, but not totally since I called to inform you that I wouldnt be there on Tues and would be picking up on wed instead. I was not asked if I knew how to get there, or informed of the move. If this simple question was asked when I called on Tues the address problem would not have been an issue because I would have inform the young man that my finacee had been there before and that would have led to the question about the move.The office situation was a case of one not knowing what the other was doing one guy said to go in there to the office and when we went to go another said we couldnt go in there. I also understand you are a busy man but I called twice was put on hold, sent to your line, never answered, asked what the problem was, put on hold again, and than told that you were busy and couldnt take my call. That Sir is a put off if I have every heard one and as a manager I know the policy's on handling complaints. However, excuses and blow-off will not bring our business back.

 

[jasonfrey]

I wasn't making excuses, i was explaining our business and how it works and I wasn't blowing you off. I'm sure you were quite upset when you came in and I'm sure our warehouse guys didn't know how to handle that.

I would be happy to work out some free shipping or something for you to make up for your gas on a future order.

 

[daveverdo]

saveafish,

Consider this scenario:

Jason drops what he is doing to come help you with your potential $1000 sale. While he is working with you, I walk in with $1500 and want to talk to Jason. He tells you to wait because he has a new customer. How would you feel?

You are not special!!

Just had to express my opinion.

Dave

 

[raddogz]

I hope this has worked out in the end.

I sit here waiting on a call from the dealer letting me know if my car is fixed or not. I will call shortly because I do not want to get there (it closes at 4:30) only to find my car not fixed and now I've wasted my time taking public transportation to get there.

Moral of the story is to call before you go, and if you've never been there before ask for directions, but better yet confirm that the order is there ready for you to pick up.

It's best to not assume (you know how the saying goes) that everything is okey dokey no matter how much money you have or not have spent.

 

[liz62]

I am in Ontario, Canada and I have received excellent treatment from Premium Aquatics Online.
Michelle who works for this company is amazing and always gets back to me right away if I have any questions.
Luke who is online chat is awesome! I have chatted with him many many times and always with positive results.
On the whole, I find this store as the most accomodating American online store that I have ever dealt with.
2 thumbs up from Canada and if you were closer I would shop at your store!!!!

 

[trd47]

I too have had excellent CS with premiumaquatics. I ordered a pump looking to spend no more than $75 shipped. And when I checked out the shipping option that I wanted so I could save some money wasn't there so I emailed premiumaquatics and I got a quick reply from Jason Frey, saying he would ship my pump with the shipping option I wanted. Seriously they went ou of their way to go to another shipper for me. So this would be an example of him helping someone out who wants to buy something small, or cheap in your case.

 

[Capt. Nemo]

Moral of story. Some people just cant be pleased.

 

[jimmyPx]

Hi Saveafish,

I'm really sorry that you had a bad experience with Premium Aquatics. I have been buying from Jason since his shop was a polebarn in his backyard

I used to live in Columbus Ohio and would make a 6 hour roundtrip drive to Indy just to go to Jason's shop. Even WAAAY back in those days, he was as busy as a man with his pants on fire.

I am really happy for him that he has grown his business so. But as Jason tried to tell you, running a mail order business is VERY different than running an lfs. In the warehouse, you hire people who can fill orders quickly and being nice and having great customer service is not in their job description.

That is why he has the Customer Service people out front on the weekends and emailing and talking to his customers during the week. These people who have being nice and friendly IN their job description.

I have ordered thousands and thousands of dollars from Jason over the years and a couple of times there were hiccups. My suggestion would be to accept his apology and let him make it right for you. He always has for me in the past and that's why, even though I now live in Florida, that I STILL buy most of my reef stuff from him.

 

[kdblove_99]

Sorry to hear that, I hope all get worked out.

I have always had the best service from PA