Bad Bad Customer Service

Inspired by this post from Mums Take Five on customer service I thought I would share some of my experiences both from a house building point of view and a normal retail experience.

The one I have had in my drafts for a while is a story of the day we went to a certain big name (may start with steg and end in bar) window and door company to pick a colour for our windows.  We had chosen our brick colour which is a really dark brown chocolatey colour and now needed to find a window colour in a bit of a hurry as the builders needed to order them.  We had the brochure of standard colours but we wanted to see how the brick looked up against them so we had to go to a show room. 

• The show room was great except most of the displays were "discontinued or unavailable"
• The first "salesman" the HOTH spoke too had no idea about anything he was asking.
• The "ahem" lady who ended up "helping" us was to be honest shocking at her job and needed a big lesson in customer service.  She made three important mistakes which in my book are a big no no.
• Firstly when we asked about a `certain colour we were interested in she said and I quote "  You have terrible taste in colours"  EXCUSE ME how freaking rude.
• Second she then proceeded to make me feel like an idiot when I asked the HOTH not her if we could just get a colour and paint it later if we didn't like it.  Turns out you can but its a pain in the ass.
• Third and final she then said it we could have any colour for the small cost of a few thousand dollars over a standard sized house.  Which annoyed me for two reasons.  1 "a few thousand" is a lot of money and 2 after all was said and done the builder told us we could have had the colour we wanted at trade prices which she should have told us as she knew we were building with a builder.

We walked out of there fuming as that had been a wasted trip and with time not our side we were extremely frustrated.  I could not believe the unprofessional and sloppy attitude of the staff and if we had not been locked in to use this company I would have looked elsewhere without a doubt.

I worked in retail for a long time and I know how to treat customers and how we were treated that Saturday morning was NOT how you do it. 

If I was in business I would probably be concerned with social media etc and be treating my customers like everyone knows thousands of potential customers.  I find it interesting that so many businesses now have facebook pages yet if people post complaints or anything negative the comments are removed. 

I am a big believer in word of mouth for the good and the bad and I  have no problem telling the world on my blog about both.

Yep really terrible taste!! 

In other news I am back finally after a hectic 2 weeks of moving!!  Still unpacking but getting there big time!!  So fill me in what have I missed??  Oh and if you are nice enough to leave me a comment feel free to leave a link so I can pop by and say hi!!  I have missed my blog reading in the last 2 weeks!!