I got a phone call from an outlying store about 4:30 on Friday saying they’d sold a laptop to a customer but didn’t have any in stock, so the customer was going to call into our store and pick it up. Great, says I. A Laptop sale.
No, explains Outlying Store. They’ve already paid for it, you’re just going to give them the laptop.
Err, that’s not how it works, I said. If the customer is prepared to drive here to get it, then they can pay for it when they get here. Secondly, it’s a display model, so it has to be packed down and restored to factory settings before we can sell it. That’s going to take at least 45 minutes, and we’re flat out here as it is. So no, I’m not just handing a computer over to some guy comes in with a receipt. We don’t work like that and it opens us up to all sorts of stock control problems.
Your area manager is going to make you do it anyway, says Outlying Store.
That’s fine, I said. He can call me and tell me personally. Until then, I’m not giving anyone a computer unless they’ve paid for it here in the store or I’ve got a proper transfer request from our area manager.
I called our store manager (it was his day off) and told him what had happened, and he agreed with me that if the customer wasn’t paying for the laptop in our store, then we shouldn’t be giving it to them. The net result was going to be us down $1,500 worth of stock and 45 minutes of valuable time because the manager in an outlying store had taken it upon themselves to sell a product they don’t have at that store.
Funnily enough, outlying store called back and said our Area Manager had said we had to give the customer the laptop, and that the customer was on his way to pick it up. I warned the outlying store that it was going to take at least 45 minutes for a complete system restore.
In the meantime, our store manager had been trying to get hold of our Area Manager to confirm this had been authorised (instead of one of the managers just making shit up), to no avail. We decided to go ahead anyway, since the customer is on the way.
We were busy- really, really busy. There were only three of us on, and I was the only one with the authority to approve refunds, exchanges, price over-rides, and so on. It took about 10 minutes before I could get away from the counter and the customers long enough to start packing down the laptop.
Customer arrives about halfway through the reformat, so I politely explain to them that the computer they’ve been promised is, in fact, a display model, and I’m performing a complete system restore on the system so that it is in the same condition that it was when it left the factory, and that it should be done in another 20 minutes or so. I offer my apologies for the delay, but again stress that a complete system restore is standard procedure with all display model laptops and he will be able to customise it to his liking.
I should pause here to mention that all the laptops we sell have Windows Vista on them, and that once you’ve created a user account for a WinVista laptop, there will be an unrenameable folder in the “Users” section of the computer with that user account name on it. You can change the User name, but that particular folder will always be named whatever your first user account was called. In other words, if you buy a computer and the first account you have is called “Jim”, there will be a folder in the “Users” folder called “Jim”, where lots of important documents etc get stored by default. If you change the user name from “Jim” to “James”, the user folder will still be called “Jim”, and cannot (for all intents and purposes) be readily renamed.
Given that the average computer purchaser has about as much computer literacy as packet of Tic-Tacs, it’s expedient to perform a complete restore on display model computers to allow the customer to customise their computer as they see fit, and not to mention removing our installed POS screensavers etc. Also, people fiddle around with the computers when we demonstrate them (they’re password protected), but when we log on to let the customers see the desktop etc we sometimes get distracted by other matters and it’s not unusual for people to rename desktop icons as “MS east poo” (sic) and so on. You can see why we reformat them, in other words.
Anyway, back to our narration. I gave the customer the jargon-free version of the preceding two paragraphs, explained the system would be ready shortly, and that he should feel free to browse the store in the meantime. Customer said that was fine, and I politely excused myself and went back to serving the Golden Horde of customers which had descended upon our store in an effort to purchase batteries, cheap DVD players, and transistor radios for the weekend.
Soon after, the system was restored, I packed it all into the box, thanked the customer for their patience, and gave them the laptop. They seemed happy when they left, and we (the remaining staff and I) could get on with closing the store and going home for the evening.
Everything seemed well and good until the store manager and I had a discussion yesterday and he told me that the customer had refunded the laptop at the outlying store on Monday because he wasn’t satisfied with our customer service.
“What the fuck did he expect???” I asked. “The London Symphony Orchestra playing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik as he walked through the door? Perhaps he would have liked a smoking jacket and a fez to wear while he was in the store? Or maybe he wanted turban-clad punkawallahs to fan him with over-size palm fronds whilst relaxing in a conveniently placed Easy Chair with Ottoman whilst sipping a complimentary Glenlivet?”
“Well, that’s not really the point of this discussion…” the store manager explained, and then proceeded to launch into a kind of Self-Reflection And Discussion Learnings For Make Benefit Of Future Happenings, also known as a “Debriefing”. Edited highlights: We were supposed to discuss what we did wrong, and what could have been done better, and how we were supposed to look at the positive aspects of the situation.
“Did it occur to you- or our Area Manager-” I asked him “-that the customer probably got a better deal on a laptop somewhere else and was just making something up to avoid having to say that one of our competitors offered him a far better deal? Or maybe he was trying some sort of tax dodge thing? Get a product, copy the receipt, return it, and use the copy of the receipt to claim $1,500 worth of laptop on his taxes?”
“I’m only going on what our area manager has told me” he said.
“Heaven forbid he should actually tell one of our customers to get stuffed” I said. “You know I was nice to the guy- the two staff who were working with me that day will happily back me up there- so essentially this boils down to one of the managers at an outlying store doing the wrong thing- an unethical thing, I might add, since I was the one who had to do all the work and reformat the laptop, yet they got the store figures for the sale- and it’s our fault that the guy decided to return the laptop because he got a better deal somewhere else, or his missus threw a wobbly for spending that much, or because he only needed a laptop for a couple of days and thought he’d try his luck.”
“Er…”
“People do not refund $1,500 worth of laptop three days after the fact because they weren’t happy with the service.”
“Anyway, the important thing is to identify where we could improve if this sort of thing happens again… So, now we have to do what we have to do to make the sale…” says the manager
“Which we did…” I said
“… and we have to think of what’s best for the customer” he continued.
“Which I did. I gave him a system at factory settings. If I’d just deleted the screensaver and given him the PC, he would have been back in a few days complaining about how he couldn’t rename the user folder or how the desktop icons had been renamed or something. You know what our customers are like.”
“OK, it’s quite probable that there’s nothing we could have done to achieve a satisfactory outcome for the customer in this case” he says.
“So why are we having this conversation???” I asked.
Well, basically, because he’s got a “Process” to follow, and apparently that “Process” doesn’t have a “Fuckwit Customer” checkbox or “Other store selling products they don’t have in stock and expecting us to sort it out” option. As it turns out, the store manager did admit a large amount of shortcoming in the situation, but that’s beside the point- we shouldn’t be letting customers refund $1,500 worth of laptop for any reason besides manufacturer’s fault within the DOA period, but that’s a topic for another thread entirely.
Anyway, the point of this rant: FUCK YOU! to the asshole who wasted my time and my staff’s time and then complained after I did them a favour by making sure they got an as close to factory new laptop as I possibly could. It’s fuckheads like you that make me wonder why I bother getting up in the morning and make retail the depressingly miserable place it is.
Anyone feel like getting me a nice job in a museum somewhere? 