I am in the middle of a remodel project, which includes buying some home automation gear. I purchased something from Smarthome.com, and on most items, they claim to “ship same day”. The price was good enough that I didn’t mind paying for 2 Day shipping; I wanted it for this weekend so I could install it. I wasn’t really worried about any issues with them since they *seemed* to be a reputable company.
When I didn’t receive a tracking number by the next morning, I emailed customer service:
It’s now the next day, and I have yet to receive any communication or shipping notification. Seeing how I paid $20 for express shipping, I’ve determined that it was wasted money since I won’t receive the item in time, and will have to attempt to find one locally or use Z-Wave locks for my project instead.
This is my first, and possibly, last purchase from your company, depending on how this situation is handled. I hope this can be taken care of so that I don’t need to cancel my order, but the ball is in your court.
I got a reply about 2 hours later:
You can tracking this order on Fedex.com with tracking XXXXXXXXXX
Um,…okay. So, you shipped my order late, and didn’t at least comp the extra for overnight shipping? I’ve spent over $300 ordering from you, not including the $20 for 2-Day shipping, but that extra $10 to make a customer not hate you must be worth it.
I responded with this:
It wasn’t shipped out the day that I placed the order (as it says it will in bright green type next to the item), so please cancel and refund the order. It’s of zero use to me on Monday. Had it shipped yesterday as your site said it would, it would be here Friday.
That was around 2PM Pacific Thursday. They finally agreed to refund me around 11AM Pacific on Friday, but not after I had to turn on “giant jerk” mode to get them to pay for return shipping.
Also, every email response to them is followed by the usual “We got your email, but don’t respond to this”. Why? If you send a customer an email, no matter what it is, someone should be listening on the other side.
A simple $10 investment would have netted them hundreds of dollars over the next year, but now, I’ll just use their competitor (Amazon, mainly). By my estimations, they'll have lost around $200 on this interaction (sunk employee time, mostly) by the time return shipping is factored in.
Am I just lucky, or are they always this crappy to customers? I had to get downright evil with them to get them to pay for return shipping for *their* screwup.
The thing that makes me the most mad about this is not once did they ever say "We're sorry this is happening". Even if it were 100% my fault, empathy goes a long way towards fixing the situation. I work in customer service for a very well-known tech company (not Amazon, btw), and everything that you could do wrong pretty much happened here.
