This week I paid a regular visit to a well-known company that specialises in refilling ink cartridges here in the U.K. I have been using this service for ten years and have always enjoyed the experience. This time, the very friendly and professional assistant asked me if I would like to take replacement ink cartridges at the same price as refills as they didn’t have my type of ink cartridges ready re-filled. I accepted easily, after all, hadn’t I had a great customer experience here every time for the past ten years?
When I got gack to my home office I tried to fit these replacement ink cartridges into my printer. Then I tried again, and again. Finally after nearly an hour, I gave up, drove back to the store with the offending ink cartridges and was served by a different assistant. She was very friendly and helpful too, and was about to give me branded replacement cartridges for my printer at no charge, when the young lady who had served me earlier, interrupted. ‘No, actually, you can’t do that’ she whispered to her colleague, and then took over the conversation with me. She told me that, actually (she used that word a lot!) they weren’t allowed to do that – if I wanted to take the more expensive branded replacement ink cartridges I would have to pay the difference. After a few minutes of exchanging conversation about that idea, I came up with the solution to the problem myself. If she still had the original ink cartridges that I had brought in to be refilled, could she refill them for me. I was quite prepared to wait.
That was what we did in the end – in the meantime I had lost an hour or more of my day. I left the store feeling reasonably satisfied, but not completely satisfied. I will go back, but I will have my guard up next time, and I will tell them exactly what I want.
Imagine how I would have felt if I had left the store with the branded replacement ink cartridges at no extra cost – if the newer member of the team had been allowed to use her initiative and keep the customer happy – I would have become a raving fan of that company and it probably wouldn’t have taken me three days to write a blog post about it. Now, I haven’t even mentioned their name.
What does that tell you about who controls customer service in that business? Who makes the decisions? Is this company a maze of processes and procedures that are designed to make a profit at the expense of great customer service? I’ll let you decide.