I got to work this morning to find this email…(very paraphrased since I don’t have it in front of me)
“I called last night at 6:58 and asked what time you closed, the person who answered told me that your closing time was 7pm. I told her that I only needed one thing and that I would be there in 5 minutes and asked if she could stay open a few minutes late. She sounded annoyed and told me it’s store policy to close at 7 and that the only way I could get what I needed was if I could get there in the next 2 minutes”
The rest of the email is irrelevant. I checked my caller ID from last night and that is when she called. I know exactly who she talked to because this person just has an “I’m annoyed” sounding voice…even when she’s not annoyed and I talked to someone else who heard the phone call that verified (from our end) that appears to have been how the conversation went (the person on the phone didn’t work today). My employee also told her that if someone else was still shopping the door would likely still be unlocked, but if the store is empty at 7 it gets locked.
So, my reply (again, paraphrased) was the following.
“We’re very sorry for the inconvenience, but for safety and security reasons it is our policy to lock the doors at 7:00 (on weekdays) and we don’t allow our employees and leeway to make judgment calls on that. If you’d like to send me your address, we’d be happy to send you a gift card for your troubles.”
I thought that seemed fair and figured that would be the end of it. A little while later I got another email from her…
She thanked me for the response, declined the gift card and said she just wanted to be heard but “Can’t believe we couldn’t help her. I can understand not staying open until 10 after but I was only going to be there 3 minutes past closing time”
At this point, I felt I had three options.
1)Ignore the email and assume ‘she’s been heard’
2)reply stating exactly what I said the first time
3)reply with the following
“Like I said, it’s our policy to close at 7 and has been for the 19 years that I’ve been working there. We do this for safety reasons as many businesses in our area have been robbed after closing time and we don’t want to assume that liability. Also, the problem is, if we stay open until 7:03 for you, what about the person that’s banging on the window at 7:05 or the person that calls at 7:08 and says they’ll be there in 5 minutes because they’re right up the street? We have to draw the line somewhere and we feel the fairest thing for everyone is to draw that line at our posted closing time. etc blah blah blah”
I sent out reply 3 and felt it might have been a bit snarky but I wasn’t sure what else to do. I didn’t want to just ignore her but how do you explain to someone that says “I understand that you can’t stay open until 7:10 but I was going to be there at 7:03” This is a person that clearly understands that a line has to be drawn, but wants it to be drawn where it’s convenient to them.
I think you played it about right. This customer just wanted what she wanted, and her need to buy something at 7:03 was the most important thing to her at the time, and she wasn’t seeing the downside. I think you did a good job of explaining why this doesn’t work for your business.
Roddy
Yeah, good for you…sucks for me. Problem is, she may, in general be a great customer and I might not want to lose her over this. When the boss told me to send her a gift card I looked at him and said “We should send her $5 because she was running late?” But hey, she declined it. I think she just needed to vent. If she writes back, depending on her tone, she might get my world famous “What would you like me to do?” question.
But yeah, write an email/complaint to most companies and they’ll send you coupons for more product you complained about.
I might have wrote something like, “I understand your frustration, and I will talk to our employees so they can better explain the reasons why we just aren’t able to accept customers after our designated closing time. I appreciate that you have taken the time to raise this issue to my attention, and I hope you will continue to shop at The Chain Gang’s Bondage and Adult Toy Emporium.”
As in, not really argue or defend the policy, just assure the customer that they were heard.
I don’t think you did anything wrong but I personally wouldn’t have sent the second email. It sounded like she was content with your first response and just wanted to get in the last word, as annoying people often do. Writing her back a second time only invites her to continue the dialogue, which will only serve to drive both of you crazy.
I would have gone with option 1 and think it’s definitely the best choice. I don’t deal with a lot of customers personally but I often have to when it’s someone like this customer - just wants to keep complaining.
There’s not even an ‘until’ point where she would be satisfied to stop complaining. You could invite her to come at 7:03 tonight and promise to personally stay open and she wouldn’t be happy. She’d probably write back and say she doesn’t need to tonight, she just thinks you should have stayed open last night. Never mind that she said that twice already.
You could offer to lend her your time machine and take her back in time so she could keep the store open late yesterday, and she’d still write back that she just thinks you should have accommodated her the first time through the space-time continuum.
Maybe she’d become reasonable but after people start repeating their problem in spite of there being physically no way to resolve it I immediately assume they will never be content and politely stop answering. In this case, your first e-mail satisfied the “stop answering” requirement.
That’s probably a good point and I probably should have just dropped the whole thing when she declined the gift card and mentioned that she just wanted to be heard.
I get the feeling that her email probably stemmed mostly from the person she talked to who, like I said, just has a voice/disposition that makes her sound permanently annoyed. Think Winona Ryder in, well, most Winona Ryder movies.
Some people are not going to be happy with anyone else’s rules, and this customer is one of them. So what if your store runs a risk of robbery? So what if your employees might be endangered? SHE isn’t getting what SHE wants, and she’s not even getting the satisfaction of being told that you will chain the employee with an unfortunate voice to the break room wall, and whipping her in front of the other employees, As An Example To Them. And then firing her.
Probably sending that second email was a mistake. However, she probably won’t darken your doors again, since you won’t treat her like the special snowflake that she is and open the store for her browsing convenience. I’ve learned that customers who “just want one thing” generally want to be able to compare the various products first, and finding that one thing will take at least half an hour.
Also, while I generally don’t write or call in with complaints, I have written fan mail to a few companies…and received a lot of coupons. I hadn’t intended to get coupons, but I’m glad to get them. The thing is, I know that there’s lots of complainers, and if a company is doing something that I like, I figure that my voice will be cherished like a jewel, and might make the difference between a product staying the same, or being degraded or discontinued.
Your second email didn’t actually address what she was annoyed with, which seems to be the tone of voice of the person answering the phone. That’s a bit of an odd thing to fire off an email about, but sometimes people use customer service complaints as a kind of a punchbag if something else vaguely related to the purchase is bothering them.
Your extra email gave an annoyed customer something else to be annoyed about; you explained too much. Also, in this context, starting something with ‘like I said’ is a polite way of saying ‘can you not READ!?’ The whole tone of that email is too informal and personal.
FWIW, I do think there’s a difference between a customer calling up to say ‘I’ll be there in ten minutes to buy x item, can you please hold the doors open for 3 minutes longer than usual?’ and letting people in after the usual time. Many years ago I worked in a sweetshop which sold salt liquorice as one of its many items, and salt liqourice is hard to get hold of; on the odd occasion we’d have a desperate customer - they acted like salt liquorice was smack - call and ask us to stay open late so they could get their hit. That did mean we had to hold off from cashing up one till, and not mop the front customer area, but it wasn’t the same as staying open indefinitely. We could still do most of the end of day tasks.
A local electronics shop, a branch of Maplins, did let me in about twenty minutes after closing time close to Christmas last year after I’d phoned in to request a specific item and ask if they’d still be open by the time I got there. I went back a few days later and bought most of my Christmas presents from that specific store and left positive feedback on a couple of review sites, including the one that comes up if you type their postcode into Google Maps, which was how I located them - there were no reviews at all on there before.
Really, I think it would have been better to phone her back. It’s not actually an important customer service complaint, but if you want to treat her as a valued customer with a valid complaint, as it seems you do, then it’s quicker and more personal by phone, esp. since that’s the way she first contacted you. But follow it up with an email to confirm, of course.
Man, this is a long post for a non-issue. I’m avoiding chores.
I’m sorry you were inconvenienced by our store policy, but neither the clerk you spoke to last night nor I have the power to enact or change policy. That power rests solely with the owner. If you would like to discuss the subject of changing our closing policy, I will gladly pass your information along to him so that he may contact you as his schedule allows.
Customers want ridiculous things sometimes. I once had a 25 minute conversation with a woman who wanted us to reopen a branch of our company that had closed down because she used to walk there to make her monthly payment in cash and didn’t want to have to mail a check or drive to another location instead. After 25 minutes of, “I appreciate the inconvenience this has caused you but we cannot reopen that location” and “But I can’t walk over and make my payment any more! Can’t you just open it again so people can make payments there?” I finally had to tell her that our question and answer runaround was not going to change and let her know I would pass her message along before essentially hanging up on her. Nothing I could have done (short of reopening that branch) was going to make her happy and she just wanted to bitch about it for as long as I would let her. Your problem lady sounds the same. She doesn’t want to know the why or how of your decisions regarding store hours, she just wants to bitch at someone because she was inconvenienced.
We get these calls about once a month or so and they are usually along the lines of “YOUR EMPLOYEE WOULDN’T LET ME IN!!!1!. Could I please speak to her, I want to know why she wouldn’t let me in at 7:08”. When the owner happens to be the one that gets that gets the call he usually starts off by saying something along the lines of “Ma’am, it’s our policy, if you need to be mad at someone, be mad at me, it’s not her fault. If she had let you in, she would have been disciplined for breaking the rules.”
I’m avoiding chores.