Are you ever blindsided by bad customer service?

No one tries to do a good job anymore. It’s not like when Joe and Betty ran the local appliance store. They owned the business and knew that their reputation was on the line. No so much when you work for a company that you don’t own or are not a part of. And, the sad part is, it’s getting worse as time goes by. There are not a lot of people who have a good work ethic anymore. They want to be paid big bucks but not do anything to get those big bucks.

Let the blue store know of their shortcomings...

Primary Contact
Ronda Harlow
Director Executive Customer Relations
1000 Lowe’s Boulevard
Mooresville, NC 28117
Ronda.harlow@lowes.com

to demonstrate a glimmer of humanity, the guy who called my cell, was a supervisor in appliances. I told him when I got home (he was with the manager last night), I got an email delivery is estimated to be 10/16 out of another store. So I just want to be done with it. I may place another order because it says available tomorrow.

He said well I'm sorry about all the inconvenience so if you decide to order it again, we have it here in stock and we'll be sure to deliver it to you (again, he knows they have it in stock, because he can touch the product in front of him, but the system says not in stock and will be available 10/13 at his store--I still think they cannot systematically get it on an XPO truck for delivery).

What I usually find? It's folks like this are on the entry level front lines, while the rude people become managers and directors lol

I send letters / emails to the CEO's and board members of companies describing what happened..

You'd be surprised how fast crap rolls down hill and smacks the regional & store managers in yhe face!

The Store closest to me that has poor (service, attitude, knowledge etc.) is orange. They never have accurate inventory online, miserable customer service, poor stock upkeep. The closest blue store is double the distance from me but is stellar on all counts. It was the same with the Sears store close by for years ... until it was one of the first to be closed.

Employees make or break any business. A philosophy that seems lost on most new, young employees.

Try dealing with the VA, if you think that's bad.

They are an entirely different animal altogether.

Generally squeaky wheel gets the grease. Just recently dealt with citibank regarding a referral bonus. Terms say it will post within 90 days after other party opens and maintains account. At day 100 nothing. Had to play phone tag with the banker but eventually got her to submit a ticket. It posted within a day.

Usually depends on the cost of the service/goods. Sometimes I need to cheap out, so I expect bad service. And when I get bad service, I don't care much. But i'll complain if it's a high price.

don't have the product yet, so anything is possible. But it would seem the second order has progressed normally.

I got a text this evening that the delivery will be between 1 PM and 5 PM tomorrow.

At this stage on the first order, it went to backordered and no delivery date at all. So clearly not the same situation, so it would seem.

I bought $31 worth of meat at Shop Rite in anticipation of the freezer arriving tomorrow--$1.99/lb for ribs, Italian sausage, and center cut pork chops. If I had had the freezer already, I would have bought double.

We were at the grocery store tonight and every kind of meat is $6+ per lb., so those $1.99 deals are insanity that I'll stock up on.

The stangest, I was at my son's karate at 9:30 AM, and cell rings, it's Lowe's from my town. I let it go to voicemail. A gentleman said he's calling to make sure I got my items delivered, he knows we got off to a rocky start and is sorry for any inconvenience.

If I had picked up, I would not take my frustration out on the caller. He's just doing his job. And the interesting thing is this is the second time someone apologized, when face to face, the manager did not and even said I was threatening her hahahahahahahahaha I simply said if you can't fix it, just give me your business card and I'll call down to NC. It was not a threat, it was feeling that she would not be able to get the items delivered on Friday.

I heard her say to one of her workers I can't even sell the item if we canceled this order and he bought it in person, because it's not in stock in the system, to which the person said it needs to be fixed on the back end.

Hopefully all ends well tomorrow afternoon.

An educated guess says there was human error at my store on the first order. Luckily since the freezer shows out of stock, the new order went to another store.

Customer service is merely the (perhaps ugly) face of the problem. When I entered thw workforce capitalism was (compared to today) both benign and belevolent. When corporations said that their employees were their most important asset (which they said frequently) there was actually an element of truth to the statement. Imagine that.

Then came the eighties. Capitalism was a-changing and one of the largest influences was Jack Welch of GE. No more “I’m making enough money, I don’t need to raise prices”. That turned into optimize the bejeebers out of every little thing. Engineering was always about designing to a cost but now we were no longer talking about pennies: we were talking of mills (just in case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency) ). Disk drives could be manufactured in Indonesia cheaper than in the US blah blah blah. (Note: that started with IIRC Seagate ~1977, before Jack Welch became CEO of GE.)

Well, now we’ve offshored everything. And, to repeat, we optimize the bejeebers out of every little thing. Planned obsolesence wasn’t new, but now it was perfected. Now I just hate buying things. I expect them to fail and I’m not disappointed in that often enough.

Admittedly some stuff works great. I never expected cell phones to succeed as they have. I didn’t believe that we had the will to make them reliable as Old Ma Bell made their system reliable.

Offshoring also wasn’t all bad. Freeman Dyson pointed out that offshoring diminished world poverty more than anything else in the 20th century.

order, same two items assigned to another store, was executed flawlessly.

I got texts and emails and checking status, it even said Rafael will deliver your order, and 4, 3, 2, 1 stop away, you are the next delivery. Window was 1-5 PM and they came at around 1:02 PM. Took all of 5-7 minutes to bring the freezer into the basement and drop off a microwave.

This to me implies human error at my local store on the first order.

What if it were a normal $3k+ fridge and maybe another appliance? Lost revenue at the local level.

In retrospect, we're very accustomed to the second outcome. The first was quite unexpected. And we want to see confirmations with our eyes these days.

Again, I'm glad that at 16 I worked in a restaurant. Then a pizza delivery person and after that waiter. A customer service job paid for my grad school. imho all valuable experiences, well, then hahahaha today who knows. I still think the experiences shaped me in a positive way.