Simple Debt-Free Finance

What follows is a cautionary tale – not necessarily for potential Amazon.com customers, but for business owners as well.

My wife and I have been saving up for a new television for a while. (We had a 27-inch CRT television, and flat panels have come down to a reasonable price. Even so, it’s a good chunk of change when you’re living on one income…) So imagine our excitement when we found a sweet deal through Fatwallet: A 42” 720p Panasonic plasma for $480 from Amazon.com. (Before you launch into educating me how hopelessly outdated 720p plasma is, remember: we’re going from a 27” heavy-as-hello CRT with a 4:3 aspect ratio, and nowhere near HD.)

Anyway, this was a great offer and we jumped on it. We made sure when we ordered a flat screen t.v. that it was being sold through Amazon and not a 3rd party.

Here’s the problem: We never got our tv!

Well, to be honest, that wasn’t the real problem here. The real problem is that Amazon.com didn’t care that we never received our television. This is a text book case of how not to handle a customer complaint…

In the beginning, life is good.

One day after we placed our order, we received an email stating that our t.v. would be shipped within the next 24-48 hours. After that, the email stated, we would be able to track our shipment and see when it would be delivered. Great. In fact, the whole first week seemed to go by without a hitch.

Then we saw that the shipping company had listed our t.v. as “out for delivery”. That was an exciting moment, until we saw that the date of that was 3 days previous.

What the hell had happened to our t.v.?

It shouldn’t take 3 days to find our house and unload the t.v. since the local distribution center was 30 miles away. So we called the shipping company and one thing led to another..

Amazon.com contracted with Ceva shipping, who in turn sub-contracted to a second, more regional shipper – Let’s call them “company B”. Apparently, Amazon never passed the contact information along to the shipper, so they couldn’t call to schedule a delivery.

At that point, shipping company B returned the t.v. to Ceva so they could return it to Amazon as “undeliverable”.

Now, I understand that mistakes happen and things don’t always go perfectly, but it took us another 3 days of repeat phone calls to the shipping companies to find out where the t.v. was. Ceva would say that they handed the delivery off to company B, company B in turn said they had handed it back to Ceva. Both companies felt it was not their problem as they had handed it off to the next party in the process. Bottom line: no one had any idea of where this television was, or when they’d be able to find out.

This alone is unacceptable in the modern age of GPS and computer tracking, but it gets worse.

How to lose a customer.

When I called Amazon to get them involved, it was 6 days after our television was supposed to have been delivered. I calmly explained the situation and worked my way up the chain of command. I eventually landed with a very pleasant woman named Sarah, who was a “hardline support agent.”

Sarah seemed interested in helping me track down my television and even called her contact at Ceva at one point and then company B herself. When she took me off hold, she explained that they gave her the same story they gave me.

I told her that I was getting irritated by this and that it’s quickly becoming not worth my time to wait for Amazon to work things out with their shipping company – especially when I could just go to the local box store and pick up a comparable television that day!

Her response?

“I’m sorry sir. I understand your frustration, and it’s too bad that you had to experience this with your first big order from Amazon. This sort of thing hardly ever happens. You’re just unlucky.”

Really? “too bad” “just unlucky” She pretty much told me, “sucks to be you” (albeit in a pleasant voice). All of this was made worse by the fact that she couldn’t even tell me where my t.v. was.

So, I thanked her for her pleasant demeanor and told her to cancel the order and issue a refund.

An hour later, I was hooking up my new Samsung HD plasma screen t.v. that I got from a local box store for $20 more than the one I never received from Amazon. It was worth every penny of that extra $20.

It didn’t have to be like this.

For the life of me I just cannot understand why Amazon had nothing more to offer than, “gee we’re sorry.”

If Amazon had offered to upgrade my t.v. to the next size up, or overnight the same model I ordered to my house with a competent shipping company I would have been a happy customer. If they had even offered a token $75 gift card, it would have gone a long way toward making me feel like they cared about my business. Instead, they did the opposite – made me feel like I was just another number that they could live without.

One of the first lessons I learned when working with customer support was that a customer should always be left happy. If you can take a disgruntled customer and turn him into a satisfied customer you’ve done wonders for business. The reason for this is that most companies (apparently not Amazon) realize that a disgruntled customer is 7 times more likely to do what I have just done – share his unpleasant experience with everyone he knows. It’s a frustrating fact for businesses that most happy customers rarely tell their friends about a shopping experience that went well, while the irritated shopper will shout from the mountain top about the time things didn’t go right. It’s human nature. People like to grumble and complain. But why would a company choose to have negative things shared about them rather than the positive?

Why didn’t Amazon choose to have me tell people about how they made a mistake, but took care of me as a customer in the end?

Instead, they leave me compelled to say, “I won’t be shopping at Amazon.com again.”

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