The Cost of Doing Business with Big Business
I know its an unlikely topic for this blog. Nothing about the kids…but as a stay at home/working mom, I have had to spend more time than I would like dealing with call centers and other people who are following “procedure” at the cost of service. Whether it is the phone company, airlines, cable company, or furniture store, most every interaction is frustrating at best and in the end I always wonder why we gave them our money.
Case in point…Rooms to Go Kids. We bought an adorable bedroom set for our 3 year old. A set we tried to find elsewhere without success, so we ended up ordering the set online. The earliest delivery date available was 6 weeks after purchase – should have been a red flag, but hey we were ordering for her birthday and the timing wasn’t so bad. So we spent our money and waited… Week before delivery we get the automated call. “You are scheduled for an all day delivery, please be home between the hours of 7 am and 10 pm”. What? Did they just ask me to sit home waiting for 15 hours? Really? Who does that? So I called the 800 number. Can I get a little closer estimation? I was told they would call the day ahead of time to give us the 4 hour block of time they really thought they would be there. Ok fine…
Day of delivery, they showed up hour 2 of the block of time. Not too bad really, but the 2 men that showed up on our door were not really equipped to be doing this job in the first place. One seemed to be staggering up and down the stairs, physically having a hard time moving the pieces and the other told us that his 2 year old had given him a stomach flu and “oh do you have any pepto I could use?”. Thank you so much for bringing your nasty flu into our home which obviously has children!! Call in sick all ready! It took these 2 a full hour to bring in 3 pieces of furniture. The headboard on the bed had a ding on it which they had to get someone over to fix, the mirror broke oh and they used screws that were too short on the bed slats so they weren’t actually attached to the bed.
After this annoying experience, the RTG 800# called. A real person for the first time since we ordered the set talked to us and asked about our delivery. While it was nice to speak to a real person, it was an unfortunate time for the call. They did get an ear full and for the most part she did rectify most of the situation, however we are still waiting for the mirror and are again waiting for the delivery. When we called to get a more specific time this time they said that they couldn’t call us in advance, but when pressed my husband did get them to at least give us an hour in advance call. But they act as though this is a special and annoying task because it seems everyone just sits home all day long.
Unfortunately pretty much all service calls are similar in nature these days. Anytime a call center is involved they are always following “procedure” and have been trained to regurgitate company policy, but traits like compassion and common sense are oddly missing from the equation. Yet I’m sure the people who run these call centers are also annoyed when they have to deal with poor service, but for some reason the problem continues.
