Is Customer Service dead? In the age of Click & Collect convenience, is the Customer of little importance in the grand scheme of things? What are your experiences?
As an example, here is a message I just sent to Jaycar Electronics:
"Hi, I placed an online order (########) and it said all items were in stock and it would take 1 hour for the click & collect to be ready. I have not received a single message or email since the order confirmation. That was 1 month ago. I have tried (unsuccessfully) a couple of times to get some sense out of your online chat to find out what is going on. I THOUGHT AT LEAST SOMEBODY MIGHT LOOK INTO IT !!! Obviously something must have gone wrong, as this is not your usual customer service. To Recap: "1 Hour" Click & Collect Order - have heard nothing whatsoever from Jaycar for an entire Month. Seriously, what the hell ?"
I don't think that was quite ranty enough. I am particularly P.O.'d by the attitude of the live chat people. Do they not go "Oh crap, we haven't contacted this guy about his order for weeks, better chase it up for him" ? No, they do not. I wait for ages to "chat" with someone, then they say "hold on a minute", after 10-15 more minutes they haven't got back to me so I type in my query, then wait more ages, then I can't wait anymore and have to go out. But do they action my query? Do they follow it up? NO, they do not !!!
Fixing the problem at THEIR end does not rely on me being present in any chat or providing more information. I've told them the problem. They go and fix it (or don't !).
Personally, I think it is the height of rudeness. From my point of view, the expectation was that the Click & Collect Order would be ready in 1 Hour. It said nothing to the contrary and all items were shown as being in stock. I was not expecting to not hear anything for a month, and I certainly don't recall anything saying that it might take any more than 1 Hour.
What do you think? Am I being unreasonable? Should I have to keep chasing Jaycar to get a simple answer, or is it their responsibility to keep me informed?
UPDATE #1: No reply yet to my "Contact Me" form from yesterday morning. Am I invisible? Do I not exist?
UPDATE #2: No, I didn't phone them (for the 500 Million people who asked), but I did go into the Store. The actual physical Store. And I was GOING to ask them. What happened? As soon as I arrive at the store, some Teacher comes in with about 30 High School Students in tow. Then a bunch of other people. So consequently all the staff were flat out busy and people were lined up behind me. So I bought my couple of things and hot-footed it out of that people-y environment without finding out about my C&C.
I will say this. I ordered a ton of crap online this lockdown period, and it all arrived duly in my mailbox or parcel locker without any problems. Click & Collect seems to be an entirely different animal though. Had I ordered them to send by post, and paid for postage, I imagine the experience would have been much more normal for me.
I agree that my communication difficulties have made it more difficult than it needs to be. I am Autistic and not particularly verbally communicative. If I was deaf / dumb I would probably experience the same kind of problems. Hope this helps by way of explanation.
UPDATE #3: Went to the store again today and finally got to ask about a very helpful gentleman about the C&C. He said someone had been lazy, and they should have got back to me the same day. The order hadn't even been picked, so they went running around to find the products in the store. Only 1 out of the 3 was still available (well, it has been over 4 weeks).
My problem wasn't that something went wrong. Obviously it had. But there should be a mechanism were Jaycar can be easily notified of problems. They need a system that forwards queries on to the store in question. It shouldn't make any difference if I phoned, or used live chat, contact us, email or whatever. They should care enough to ensure that things get fixed for the Customer who paid. They don't (I am talking about Jaycar in general here, not my local store. Those guys are in the frontlines and provide good customer service every day).
Pick up the phone maybe?