AshKAfter Gary Steel pointed out in this article that the news of Dick Smith stores being closed should come as no shock, I suppose that it should then come as no surprise to me that Dick Smith has dropped the ball yet again. I’ve had dire service at a number of Dick Smith stores over the years, most notably in the last few years; before that I used to enjoy the occasional shopping trip to old Mr. Smith’s house of odd electrical widgets and wodgets, then they put on pretensions of being an all round AV retailer and then they were the Techxperts or some such and the end was in sight.
Here’s the latest little customer service mishap – this well written little note was posted today on the Dick Smith Facebook wall:
Dear Dick
Now I know you’re going to wipe this off your wall but I’m going to write it anyway, especially since I’ve read and obeyed your “Facebook Terms of Use” and feel this post fails into the “we accept debate, dissent and criticism of our business” area.
After you recently advertised Apple Macs at 10% off I decided to buy one online from you on the 10th of March. Your site politely claims items will be shipped the next working day and that delivery takes 2 – 5 days. Hooray! (Or so I thought).
Turns out you had no stock of my Mac and, according to your call centre, you already knew this. Your call centre person told me that since the 24th of Feb you know of the lack of stock yet continued to advertise it as being available because your “online system isn’t linked to your warehouse system so we can’t monitor stock levels”. Kind of pointless and most likely total BS.
So you’ve already stolen the cash out of my account (that’s what it’s called when you take money without given something back in return) and can’t tell me when I can expect my computer. April? May? June? Talk about signing cheques your ass can’t cash. No wonder you’re going tits up.
Now instead of wiping this off your wall you should do something about it. Use your social network to show those 9,083 folk who like you that Dick does listen and help me get my MAC. PM me or something. Please.
Lots of love
To Dick’s credit, someone responded on the Facebook wall and asked for an order number but even if they magically courier out a unit overnight, the damage has been done and that bloke isn’t shopping with Dick ever again. Never, ever, ever.
It’s been said that a bad call centre experience is worse than having no phone number to call at all. Maybe a promptly answered email with an actual solution would have mollified the customer to some degree and perhaps not taking the money off his card before the goods were shipped would also be a cunning plan.
Frankly speaking, I’m somewhat annoyed as well. Why do I even care? Well I didn’t write the note but that’s actually my bloody 15” MacBook Pro! Yep – the speedy new ultra flash one that I’m meant to be using for presentations instead of my two year old 13” MacBook Pro that’s in need of an OS and software reinstall and some TLC. So yeah, thanks for wasting my time Dick – if it gets here tomorrow, I’ll at least be able to spend some time this weekend getting it ready but according to your man on the phone – “there ain’t no stock and Cheech ain’t here maaaaan”, so I might be fiddling around on the old Mac for a while. If it’s not here by Monday, Visa just gives us our money back and we’ll get it somewhere else. So long and thanks for the memories – and the Applecare warranty – that was apparently in stock but it’s not much good without an Apple.
