Dear Jason,
This whole thing would have been handled privately, discretely and politely, had your telephone person been polite and used the words, "I'm sorry" or the equivalent. The others posting here have had a great experience with you; however, I had no access to you; I had to deal with somebody else.
> This person either didn't get the message
> correctly or was confused, they called
> several times and couldn't understand why
> we were out of stock, even emailed me a
> couple times.
Exactly. The person who called used the words, "empty shelves here" and "not responsible", and wasn't willing to do or say anything to make things right. Pity is, it would have taken so little!
> After telling Melissa on the phone to hold
> the order until next week, i then get an
> email from them wondering if they should
> stay home waiting for the order.
Exactly. This is because you answered my eMail to sales@premiumaquatics.com, offering to ship the available portion of my order immediately and the balance a week later, AFTER my conversation with Melissa.
> So they got me totally confused, was like
> the information we were giving them wasn't
> sinking in.
When you have two different people giving two different pieces of information to the same customer, that's what happens.
In my business, we're very careful about this... but the difference is that when there's a communications problem with the customer, it's OUR fault, not the customer's. We assume the responsibility. I got hired for my current job two years ago, not because I was a good programmer (far from it) but because the company felt confident about representing them to their customers.
It sometimes happens that we cannot make a delivery date for software. This is on Wall Street, home of the most impatient and unforgiving people on the planet. In that case it falls to me to tell the customer what portions of the software we can deliver; and when... and I give them the option of waiting a bit to have everything at once. NEVER do I delegate this to somebody else, especially to someone without my experience, because it's too sensitive.
> This person either didn't get the message > correctly or was confused, they called
> several times and couldn't understand why
> we were out of stock, even emailed me a
> couple times.
I still don't like the idea of trusting a stock computer. I would rather deal directly with somebody who is hands-on in the business, not somebody who's just working the telephones, looks at a computer screen, and can't be courteous to customers who have already been inconvenienced.
> After telling Melissa on the phone to hold
> the order until next week, i then get an
> email from them wondering if they should
> stay home waiting for the order.
An eMail which you didn't answer!
Again, miscommunication... all of which could have been avoided by you communicating with me instead of through a third party. I eMailed you directly; yet I have no eMail responce from you; except the final one which said that you'd ship something to arrive on Saturday.
***
One thing that I've noticed with retailers, there's a defensive mechanism where they try to isolate a customer and say that the experience is a fluke and that the customer was actually the problem.
Past experiences trying to mail-order livestock have been painful indeed. I'll list them in order, and maybe you'll see why I'm burnt out:
1. Garf: doesn't ship overnight on day promised; I lose half a day's pay waiting for a shipment that does not come. Typically, nobody is there to answer the phone, and I just get to talk to a machine. The shipment came two days late; and at 4:30 in the afternoon even though I paid extra for morning delivery.
2. On two seperate occasions, another vendor sent me livestock by overnight UPS; UPS took the first time two days and the second time four days. Everything died, both times, and the box arrived hot to the touch... I didn't get a red cent in credit from the vendor, not for the shipping, not for the livestock that arrived dead. The vendor said that he wasn't responsible and that I had to go to UPS for a shipping credit; UPS said that they weren't responsible, and that I had to go to the vendor for a credit. Nice system. the credit-card-whacking department never breaks down, though.
3. Sent a money order for $67 to an aquarium "service" company that was selling Amiracle overflow box kits on the internet.
Since the company (as usual) said that they had them in stock when they whacked my credit card, I paid extra for UPS blue.
Several days went by and after eMailing them several times, I finally got a curt reply that my item has been backordered. Four weeks later my overflow was actually shipped, cobbled together from other kits, some parts new some used, and the return hose which was in the picture was entirely missing. But it DID go UPS blue, and for some strange reason it actually took only two days!
On this occasion I went to the manufacturer and discovered that the vendor was selling things that he didn't actually HAVE in stock, but was taking money from customers, waiting, finally placing orders with the manufacturers, and living on the cash float. How typical this is of the dot-coms, I don't know.
4. Sent a money order for $165 to another aquarium "service" outfit on the internet, for a "new condition" Turbofloter skimmer which was retrofitted with a European pump, instead of the noisy and dangerous Rio. This skimmer turned out to be a dirty, worn out piece of junk, as was the pump, which made a loud noise, spit out some teeth, then wouldn't run at all.
In each case, the retailer was "not responsible" and was neither apologetic nor so much as gave me a discount on future purchases, allow a return in the case of dry goods, or some words that would make things right.
That's is the real reason that I'm venting now, NOT because of the lost time and money. I'll pay any amount of money for careful and personal attention to my order, a number that I can call that actually answers, and a human being on the other end who actually knows something!
Because these internet businesses need to please their investors by expanding at as high a rate as possible, I don't see any of them giving a rats *** about the satisfaction of one individial customer. If I'm wrong, I'll be happy to publicly apologise and say that Jason's business is great... however right now I still think it't growing too fast, at the expense of customer service.
Heck, my Sprint PCS phone won't work right, and I can't get through to customer service there either! Do you think that I'm going to recommend this company to anybody? Quite the contrary!
