A marvelous article on one man’s experience with ordering from CompUSA’s web site, with a CompUSA credit card, and how everyone seemed to go out of their way to make it a singularly unpleasant experience.
The customer satisfaction rep also spouts the party line, and takes a while to see the Catch-22 situation. She is confrontive, and I get the feeling that I am an annoyance to her and that she thinks I’m trying to “pull something,” based on her tone of voice and choice of words. Finally, I hit home with the statement “Look, I want to give you $3,000 of my money, but you’re making it very hard for me to do so.” She agrees to resolve the problem and call me back.
This ought to be obligatory reading at business schools around the nation. Along with the notation that this sort of tale is now easily spread like wildfire around the Web, so don’t assume you’re only pissing off one customer.
(Via Boing Boing)
Man, that fellow has fortitute…
They would have lost me with the ‘register your shipping address with your credit card.’ I hate using telephones and will avoid doing so at all costs.
And it was cheaper elsewhere….
I’d like to see a breakdown of how many hours he spent persuing this problem, and tack a 50.00/hour rate on that. (low end white collar professional, right?) Now how much did he pay for the stupid monitor?
Since I use a billing service (paymybills.com — a great service), my shipping address and billing address are nearly always different on my credit card orders. Most on-line vendors have absolutely no trouble with this. Some vendors, though, do give you the electronic equivalent of a look that says, “Are you crazy? Are you nuts? Are you trying to defraud us? I don’t understand!”
It does in fact influence which vendors I do business with.
When I was trying to buy my Toshiba laptop from CDA online, they held up the shipping because of the different ship-to address from the bill-to. They actually called me up, and I had to fax them my credit card and driver’s license, with all the numbers crossed out if I wanted to. As long as it had my name and home address.
I did all that, but then they actually didn’t have it in stock. I cancelled and went to CompUSA direct (actually, drove up to New Hampshire) and bought it there.
I doubt I’ll do that again, though. They can lose my business instead.