By Denis Campbell

If retail times are tough, why do lackadaisical service and sales people have gainful employment in this or any country? You would think with sales projected to fall 10% or more in the 1st Quarter, companies would put their top sales and service people on the case for fear of haemorrhaging more through bad attitudes? Not in the UK. 

DSG International, parent company of PC World and Dixons, seems to think the Christmas ‘period’ extends through the 5th of January. And God help you trying to find relief if you don’t read the fine print on their website. 

When my carpel tunnel ailing business partner needed an ergonomic keyboard and mouse, we were Web shopping. We’ve had a PC World business account for a couple of years and when I found the items on their Web and was about to place my order and called the local store to see if someone there could look up my account number rather than dig through accounting binders to find it. 

The young person answering the phone was very cheery, checked back to see if my call had been answered and was about as good as one could expect. I then got the “seasoned veteran” on the phone for whom my call was clearly an interruption in his day. I asked if he could please look up my account number so I could place the online order. He sighed, asked for my PostCode and rattled off the number. I’ve dealt with this guy in store and usually avoid him, choosing his more service-oriented compatriots or, if the only one there, simply bought something off-the-shelf and said “put it on the account and I’ll pay for it here at the till.” 

Can you see where this is headed?

I placed the website order and clicked ‘next day’ delivery because that was when we needed it. Now today is, Tuesday, the 30th of December so the ‘Next Day’ is when? That’s right, we’ll keep them relatively easy for now, the 31st. Even allowing for early despatch closing on New Year’s Eve, Friday the 2nd was the latest I expected it to arrive. On the site were three options: Next Day, 2-3 Business Days or Xmas Delivery. 

Now, in their defence, there is a very long paragraph of text explaining what Xmas period means but if you are placing an order 5-days AFTER Christmas, on indeed the second working day of the following week, are you expected to read the page for Xmas conditions? Would you expect it to still be in affect or… might you just assume the company’s IT department is off until Monday and it was there for folks rushing before Christmas to get their stuff delivered on time?

When the despatch e-notice efficiently arrived it said delivery date: Monday, January 5th. 

Now I have paid extra for this ‘Next Day’ delivery. So I called the “customer service department” (danger!) which connected me to somewhere into deepest India where I “could not speak to a supervisor” and was told, “they would just say the same thing, anyways.” A total waste of an 0844 number call That will be .50 pence please PC World.

OK, call the store. I thought. 

And then Mr. Wonderful comes on the line and says, “yeah I talked to you earlier” (there are times I feel like Daffyd in Little Britain, “I’m the only American in the village!”). “There’s nothing I can do, you ordered on the Web.” So are the Web and the store competitors? Are you not part of the same company?

So I get upset and when he asks the magic question, you know it, the one that raises blood pressure 50 points… “what do you want me to do about it?” I reply: “if I were sitting in your chair I would call the despatch centre and speak to someone to handle it for a customer, like one of your guys did for me before and took the effort to fix the problem!” He was then about to give me a number to call myself when I screamed in anger and hung up. He called back and was prepared to lecture me on my etiquette to which I replied, “stop, I will not be lectured to,” and hung up again. 

I believe the other guys’ words way back when were something akin to “leave it with me, I’ll get it sorted.” And then he/she did.

So what is it that allows inside the same company one employee to realise “that customer is the most important thing in my day” and another to behave as we have just seen? In the past you have seen me write to BT Ben and Sir Terry Tesco about their service. So this is my letter to John Browett, CEO of DSG.

And my urging for the rest of us to not just take it, indeed demand better. Your business and consumer spend is better done at places that appreciate it.

As for me, it’s all just more material.

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P.S. As I was about to hit ‘Post’… an e-mail comes from PCWorld Business customer “service” in response to my Web form submission where I started saying:

Good Afternoon
Thank you for your email
I have looked into your query and advise that your order will be delivered on that date because you did not select the Xmas option for delivery on Wednesday and Friday

Hope this assists in your query
(aaah, so this is the new business term for ____-off? -ED.)

Kind regards
Customer Services

I cannot make up material this good…

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P.P.S.

And after all this, the keyboard arrived with 1-day delivery. Hello left hand, meet right. Right hand, say hello to the left. Why would three people inside the company say nothing can be done and the system sort itself out on its own? There has got to be some kind of award for this.