It was the former CEO of online clothing store Zappos, Tony Hsieh, who said: “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department, it should be the entire company.”
I couldn’t agree more, but ask a company’s decisionmakers if they ever engage directly with their customers and you’re likely to get blank stares.
They couldn’t possibly spend an hour a month in the call centre or respond to customer e-mails to get a true sense of the customer experience. That’s the job of far less important, far lower paid employees, or an outsourced “customer response” company.
The result is many customers get treated appallingly, illegally in some cases, while the C-suite remains blissfully unaware.
I dealt with an extreme case of this phenomenon recently. A Cape Town couple paid R50,000 for a top-of-the-range washing machine, bought directly from the manufacturers, but it was problematic from the start.
“With every load of laundry, irrespective of the size, the cycle or the type of fabric, at the end of the main washing cycle there is still a copious amount of soap suds remaining in the rinse water — even though we always add the optional ‘additional rinse’ to the main wash cycle,” the husband told me.
Despite dramatically reducing the manufacturer’s recommended laundry liquid dosage, they still had to do several extra rinse cycles — a huge schlep and waste of resources — to get the soap residue out of their clothes.
Many months and two technician visits later, and having sent the manufacturer many videos demonstrating the problem, all to no avail, the couple turned to me for help.
They had experienced the usual fob-offs: gaslighting (“There is actually nothing wrong with that machine”), blaming the customer (“You must be using the wrong soap”) and buck-passing (the Johannesburg office referred them to the Cape Town office and vice versa).
They struggled to get any further than the switchboard operators, who always promised to get someone to call them back. Never happened.
Part of our business behaviours is ‘customer first’, but clearly we failed here. I am saddened to see how this escalated without our management team being aware of it.
— Commercial director of appliance manufacturer
The couple was refunded their R50,000 and relieved of that machine after my intervention, but the company refused to accept the appliance was faulty and said it had settled the dispute out of “goodwill”.
The commercial director has since contacted me.
“This is not the way we treat our customers,” the director said. “Part of our business behaviours is ‘customer first’, but clearly we failed here. I am saddened to see how this escalated without our management team being aware of it until [our brand person] responded to you.
“The feedback that no-one returned calls either is highly concerning and must be resolved. We quickly resolved the client’s request at that point, but this was too late.”
Gratifyingly, the case has prompted the company to relook at its after-sales service and ethos.
Another case of customer-facing staff sabotaging a company’s “customer first” ethos that I dealt with in the past week was that of Dorothy Steenkamp, who bought her husband a cellphone from Pick n Pay Hyper in Durban North in March.
A month later it was “dead”. A manager at the store said it would be sent in for repairs and, not knowing her Consumer Protection Act (CPA) rights, Steenkamp agreed.
It was when the phone was returned, still faulty, that Steenkamp googled the CPA and discovered that section 56 gives consumers the legal right to return defective goods within six months of purchase, for their choice of a refund, replacement or repair.
And that if the consumer agrees to a repair, and the product malfunctions again within three months of that repair, the supplier may not repair it a second time — the consumer must then be given the choice of a refund or replacement.
But even when she drew the manager’s attention to the law, he refused to change his repair-only stance, insisting that was the cellphone company’s policy.
I took up the case, and within days Steenkamp got a call from that same manager, inviting her to return the phone for a refund.
Pick n Pay told me: “Mrs Steenkamp was quite right — her phone did indeed have a manufacturing fault and she therefore qualified for a refund or replacement. We have refunded Mrs Steenkamp in full and apologised to her. We are looking further into why this happened.”
Same story with the fridge Esme Venter bought from Game online and had delivered to her elderly parents just more than a week ago. It was dead on arrival — it simply refused to cool, so she asked for a refund and was told a technician would be sent to assess the unit and repair it.
Retailers are entitled to have goods technically assessed when a customer claims them to be defective within six months of purchase, but they can’t unilaterally repair a faulty product if the customer has indicated they want a refund or replacement.
A technician confirmed the fridge wasn’t working, but Venter said Game had insisted a refund would only be processed “if the unit is deemed irreparable by the technician”.
“But if the technician is able to fix the unit, they won't be able to accept the unit back as it has been switched on and is now a second-hand unit.”
That’s a staggering contravention of the CPA’s section 56. So I took up the case, and that appliance has also since been collected and Venter refunded.
The official response: “The agents involved in the query unfortunately applied the return policy incorrectly and the customer is indeed entitled to a refund. To try and prevent any repeat occurrences, we have reinforced the correct process and that will be supplemented with further training sessions in the call centre tomorrow.
“We are sorry.”
And I’m sorry and furious that 12 years since the CPA came into effect, so many “agents” tasked with dealing with complaints are denying customers their rights when it comes to defective products, while their bosses are attending to More Important Things.
• Contact Knowler for advice with your consumer issues via e-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za or on Twitter: @wendyknowler
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.