WTF has happened to customer service? A rant...

well, i came out on the good end of my Sears **** up story.

a number of years back, i bought a new 52" projection TV for christmas, after a week, the color went bad, called up sears and they had a new one brought out. for some reason, apparantly they couldn't just press a key on the computer saying it was defective and needed to be repaired/replaced, so they end up charging my credit card for the second TV on the promise that when the broken one is returned, they will credit my card. i wasn't thrilled, but went along. well sure enough, when my next statement comes, they did remove the charge, multiple times! my statement showed that Sears owed ME $2200! knowing this is too good to be true, the customer never comes out ahead, i kept quiet and waited it out, next statement comes, and they corrected the error, ONCE! so i ended up getting my TV for free. i didn't complain about the free VCR that i was supposed to get but never came.

every once in a while you win.

 

yeah Sears ****s that did that kind of **** to my brother with his brand new washer. F them spend your money elsewhere

 

The Sears washer/dryer combo I bought over twenty years ago was far superior to the new one I have now that breaks down once a month. I've got an extended warranty on it, & the Service guy usually shows up as promised, BUT...I get really tired of these appliances "dropping" as often as they do! It gives rise to the age-old question:"How much do I have to pay to get something to do what it's supposed to do"? Just tell me & I'll pay it!

 

Drove way the hell outside of town 5 years ago to buy a John Deere walk-behind self propelled mower and payed a more than you would if you went to Sears or Ace or wherever. I have replaced the air filter once. Never touched the spark plug. Never had to add oil. Starts on one pull every time. End of story.

Z

 

Customer service is pretty much a joke these days. I think that the backroom corporate philosophy about customer service is simply to make it more of an annoyance than the actual problem, so you just give in and deal with it. "We already got their money, **** 'em!!!"

I left the repossession / skip-tracing deal behind several years ago & decided to get into sales. So now I sell computers & I currently work for one of the more prominent manufacturers (who I will not name), and they have outsourced all of the customer service to India.

So basically you have a customer who is already frustrated, and what do you do? Transfer him / her to some dude in India that they can barely understand. Brilliant huh? Don't get me wrong, I've got no beef with India (there are some brilliant tech people there), but there's a serious language barrier, and of all the things to outsource - customer service???

And I actually feel bad for the dudes in India too. They're pretty much paid **** (or less than ****), and they get all of these pissed off people that they can barely communicate with dumped on them by the dozens, and somehow they're expected to help them. They're basically set up for failure. It's gotta be a pretty ****ty job to look forward to every day.

The bottom line is that at the company I work for, customer service is a token effort at best.

I think my employer is making a huge mistake by doing this. I speak to at least 10 people a day who say "I will never buy from you guys again because of this". Supposedly a study was done a long time ago about the power of word of mouth advertising, and supposedly people who have a good experience with a company will tell an average of 4 people about it, while those who have a bad one will tell about 17 (my memory is foggy, but I think these were the numbers).

 

I have been mowing with my 1964 Gravely for the last 10 years. My friends all made fun of me cause it has a 30" cut and I mow an acre with it. I told my wife, I may just get my money back and spend a hundred bucks on it and freshen it up and put the other 1500 bucks into hot rod parts. I can buy all of the overhaul parts for it. The last time I overhauled it was 1989.

 

We bought a Sears riding mower two years ago. They rolled it out of the delivery van and into the garage. Went out to use it and the right front tire was flat, Had a screw in it. They sent a gent out but he did not have the right tire in stock. So they ordered a tire to be delivered to me. It came and they sent the gent out again. He opened the box andthe tire was the wrong size. I went to Sears and saw the manager. Explained my problem. Told her we had a new mower and we had been waiting for over a week to mow our yard. She called in the department manager. That afternoon they came out with another new mower and swapped out. I thought they were good people trying hard but damn, they couldn't fix a flat!

 

Root, I did the same thing for 20 years with a 30" gravely. I have an acre and 1/2. It finally ate the pineapple gears inside the ****** and it was not worth rebuilding. The 7 hp motor needed going thru plus the ******.
I bought a Poulan from Home Depot and found out that it, Sears, Murray, Scotts, and all the major brands are built by one company.
Luckily, the mower I bought has been a good one, 5 years and all I have done is change the oil.
If you keep the Sears mower, do not, I repeat, do not waste your money on the mower blades that Sears sells. They will not last two mowings, and they call them a "premium" blade for $30.00.
I have better luck with the blades I buy at flea markets for $14.00 a set, they will last a year.

 

Maytag

 

45 years ago when I was kid I heard the term "Ya either swear by or swear at Sears".There is a lot of junk out there but sometimes the purchaser will play dumb. Case& point ,I guy I know bought a snowblower and ran it without oil until it seized. *****ed that the machine was NFG ,what do you think they give you a qt of oil in the box it came in??They can't ship power(gas) equipt with oil or gas in it ,maybe by reading the instructions it would not happen. My take is this we have a washer& dryer over 25 yrs old beat to death (kenmore) and both perform like new, go figure...

 

whats WORSE is being trying to jack you....like the plumbers, electricians, heat/HVAC guys..

had a guy try to tell me because he pulled the oil wick out of my Bell and Gosset circulator pump for my baseboard hot water pump....he pulled it out and said..see..this is why its leaking...your rope is broke (the oil wick was not broke..it was fine, you cant "break" an oil wick its a peice of rope for godsake), this is what turns the motor! then says..yeah they dont make this pump anymore or any parts for it..going to have to put in an updated one, going to run 850$...if he wasnt bigger than me id have cracked him in the mouth....

i went to the supply house my self, and instead of replacing just the bushing which was the ONLY thing wrong with it...i replaced the entire bearing ***embly (which from the manual, is the most common replacment part set for one of the most COMMON pumps) for 60$....and in........my girl timed it.....7 minutes.

if he would have said..ok part is 75-100 and 100 an hour ...1 hour minimum to install and it took him 15 minutes...id have said ok, no problem, as thats fair to me...let s say make 50$ on the part, and 100 in service to drive out for 15 minutes of work.

funny thing is....i called 3 places and specifically told them what i needed...gave them part numbers and what i needed, and everyone either wouldnt give me a price over the phone or said....500+

supporting small business? sure...but dont get too damn greedy. and the ONLY thing you have that big business doesnt have...is customer service.....

and you WONDER why the walmarts of today are making money. if ****s cheaper and the service is the same...or sometimes better....

 

Sears IS NOT a hardware store. They gave that up down here about two years ago when they moved in the millions of appliances and got rid of the hard ware.

 

Hey I think think you got a rebadged K mart model there=and it is perfectly normal as far as sears is concerned

 

AN ACRE!?!?!?

Holy cow, I thought you might have like 5 acres or something.

I mow an acre with a $99 push mower. I bought it 6 years ago.

Its beat to hell and smokes, but still runs good. I change the oil once a season and I changed the spark plug last year. Starts on the first pull....

It takes me 2-3 hours to mow the lawn and I get a TON of exercise.

$1500 riding lawnmowers.....pfffffft. Who needs them?

 

I hear your pain, I was talking about Sears ****ing (isn't that a suit material?) not two weeks ago.

Get this, I went in there one time looking for tack cloths, the idiot salesperson didn't know what a tack cloth was.

 

damn my sears is actually pretty good. Now the people who I am trying to get carpet from for my place now thats a different story. I already took one day off work for them to come measure. they went to the wrong ****ing address and then proceeded to tell me thbey couldn't come by that day since my "time slot" was over. Well what the **** you guy screwed up and then they had the nerve to ask me to take another day off work. Needless to say when the guy called to give me the new time slot I told him when he was coming he wasn't very happy but oh well not my problem.

 

Safariknut, that guy has some seriously funny and thought proviking articles on his site!

 

Bought a weed wacker from Sears. Had to take it back three times to get a new one. First attempt to start up the engine freezes. Go back get a new one this time the carb is bad and will not iddel. Go back for the last one and the cuting head is missing. If your not satisfied with your product shoot a letter to the better buisness people. You can do it on line and its fast and easy. Believe me when the get a call from bbb sears will listen.
Don't give up...

 

my favorite Sears story is as follows....

I was removing a VERY froze lug nut off my brothers car....we couldn't get her to break loose so I do the only sane thing....get dads 2 foot breaker bar ...when that doesn't work I get a pipe put it on the breaker bar and stand on it...it breaks loose after I jump up and down on it a few times....well when I get done the breaker bar is , well shall we say "Not Straight" anymore(so I weigh 3 bills what can I say?!?)....

I tell dad we will go get him a new one....the guy at Sears says what happened..I say it bent when I stood on it, I want a new one...he tells me "not covered"...well long story short , I was "******ed" out of the mall by security( I guess he didn't like the "wanna see what it will look like after they pull it out your ***?" comment)....when I get home the old man takes it from me and says drive me to Sears....well my old man can really be an ***hole so I was primed to see him in his best form....when we arrive I walk a ways behind him as he goes up to the counter...but to my surpise he hunches over more than normal and leans harder on his cane....dad gives him the best little old man look and asks for a new one...guy abliges....as my dad gets the new one and starts back toward the car he looks at me and says "****ers"...

LOL

 

My "Sears Story" a while back I was trying to wire something goofy up for one of the machines in the garage - only place open was Sears. So in I go with a "list" of what I needed except they didn't have everything. I walked around looking for help - but it was a ghost town. So there I sat pondering what combination I might come up with that might work. I was there for several minutes when I noticed this "customer" over on the next aisle covertly watching me - at first I ignorred him as I went through possible combinations in my head and then grabbing parts and lining them up on the floor to see if I could piece together what all I needed. Well after I spot this "customer" eyeballing me several minutes later I realize that he is in fact a SEARS employee obviously hoping to catch me trying to steal something. So I stand up and look around the aisle and say, "You know this might go alot faster if you'd just try and HELP ME rather than stand there like an idiot!" He naturally stood there like a deer in the headlights and then pretended to look puzzled as if he really was a customer and slithered away. Later as I went to leave (empty handed) I saw him behind the Customer Servive counter and looked him straight in the eye and said, "You ****! Maybe next time you see a customer needing help maybe try helping him?"

As far as the vast array of compaines that do the 9-5 thing (in terms of when they can come to the house) - I had the water company call me and want to schedule an appointment to come inside and inspect my meter. They give me the whole line about their guy coming anywhere between noon and 6. I say, "well I work, but I could get off a little early and be home by 4:00" so after 4:00 would be good. the lady says "sir I don't think you understand....blah blah blah" I tell her I understand just fine and her guy is welcome to come ANY time he wants, but I won't be there until 4. Eventually she got my drift.

I tried to accomodate them, but they expect me to rearrange my life totally around them - Screw that - I am the customer - they called me - I didn't call them.

 

Don't condemn the people, they are doing what they are trained to do by the corporate en***y that is told what to train people to do. Having worked for a while with a MAJOR cellular phone service provider (AT&T Wireless - now gone) I can tell you that the people mor eoften than not want to help you, but the companies put up so many roadblocks and hurdles that it's damn near impossible to do the right thing even when you are tryign too. I could never count how many times I had to tell a customer there was nothing I could do for them, nor how many times I was swore at and called things you wouldn't call an enemy. Bottom line was/is authority to do the right thing is being striped away from the guy in the field and given to a penny counter in a cubicle in some ther area of the country or increasingly the world.

The larger a company is, the more abusive they are of their customers. Small businesses know that EVERY customer matters. Big business looks at individual customers as very small parts of it's total customer base and they know that existing customers with leave and new customers will come. It's just expected customer turnover. It's planned for and expected. Since some customers are gonna leave anyway, they don't worry about small (to the company) things and they only look at overall customer satisfaction. It's a big deal to you, but not to them.

 

As far as mowers are concerned I will buy Snapper from here on out. If you read this article... The man who said no to Wal Mart
They're actually doing what is best for the company and the customer.... Check it out... warning they are not cheap, but I'm willing to spend a bit more on quality American made products...

 

Nads, I was at a hardware store and the kid thought I needed an

'attack cloth.'

What I've seen, companies have policies in place that only allow the employees to help the customers that make the most noise... the ole squeaky wheel gets the oil. They figure if the customer has to jump through too many hoops to get something done, they might just give up. (ever try to return something off of Amazon.Com?)

I'm in the customer service industry... so I am lucky enough to see it from both sides.

Someone above said the customer is not always right...

...and how!!

 

I bought a pair of 50' "lifetime warranty" rubber garden hoses at Sears ten or so years ago, and they (the hoses) have given me good service. However, a couple years ago one of them started to leak where the end was crimped on to the hose. So I grabbed the "lifetime warranty" card that came in the original packaging (I've got a file with all of my warranties) and off to Sears I went. Explained the deal to them, and they quickly brought out a new replacement lifetime warranty hose. However, the new hose, while still 5/8 inch inside diameter, had couplings on the ends where the diameter was greatly reduced, to somewhere just under 1/2 inch. I tried to explain that this decrease in diameter would affect the volume of water the hose could carry, to which he responded "yeah, but you'll have more pressure". WTF? For a very short time I tried to give him a tutorial in fluid dynamics, then realized that any learning or understanding wasn't an option with this fellow. So I told him I wanted my old hose back, and I would just put new, larger diameter couplings on the ends. Too late, he said they had already "destroyed" the old hose, which was standard treatment protocol for malfunctioning goods. Yeah, right! I know the ***hole took my old hose and threw it into the back of his ***** little import pickup and is probably still using it today. Anyway, I told the guy he was an idiot, took the new hose and went home. This thread makes me pissed all over again............

 

Last company I worked for went from $50 million a year,
to $25 million a year,in sales,
in a booming economy with a growing market.

How ? By pushing **** out the door,and ignoring the customer.
Eventually,they got bought out by a smaller compe***or,
and all the big Idiots cashed in.

Too many Managers,and not enough Leaders.

Demming was right:
Leadership can only be provided through profound knowledge.

 

My family hasn't gone to Sears for anything since about 1973.

 

I love that story.....first read it in a magzine a few months back.....I have been preaching buy local, buy from who you know, buy with your concience.....I may be paying a bit more but it is worth it all....