Monday, June 15, 2009

THE LAST WORD ON COMPLAINTS AND COMPLIMENTS

I have written 2 blogs of late about experience ratios from customers of National Builder Supply and I intend this to be the last in hopes that those of you who are seeking comfort in purchasing online will see the transparency that the good folks at NBS and the H.M.Wallace companies offer. No matter which of the online entities you happen across they all represent solid , thoughtful and honest customer service and great value. They also have a presence on EBAY listed as National Builder Supply with feedback and “Power Seller” history in which you can deal with confidence if EBAY is your choice of business venue.
In seeking a history of complaints I found the only one to be an EBAY feedback complaint from a toilet pictured with a toilet seat and the seat was not included. The site clearly shows that the customer must choose their option of a seat and color. To avoid this problem, as I mentioned in the previous blog, Marcus Morgan, the owner, asked me to undetake a complete review of the manufacturers catalogs comparing the websites for picture, price and inclusion of every catalog item. This is how serious they are about trying to make your purchasing experience as pperfect as possible.

I asked Fran to dig deep and relate to me the most frequent problem that arises that causes customer concern. After all no one is perfect but I believe the folks ay NBS certainly try. Fran had related an actual episode in which this example of problem had arisen and I wrote about it in my previous blog. In her own words here is how it happens:

“I'd say that the one major problem we have goes a little something like this:

A customer comes to one of our website and orders a toilet, or 5 toilets. They don't really read the policies section. The price is great, so all is well. In a few minutes they get a email confirming the order. They check out the address and maybe the total. Everything looks good. A day or so later they get another email, we are shipping their order. They see the tracking number, maybe they even track the package. But not one time on the site or in any of our emails do they read any of the very important information printed.
When you order one toilet we ship that via Fedex ground. They will leave it at your door with no signature required. You have 48 hours to inspect it and report any damages back to us. This is not because we want to be mean, its because we are only given a certain amount of time to file a claim with Fedex. The toilets are NOT broken when they leave here, so this means Fedex broke the toilet along the way. Keep in mind we are not asking you to make sure the toilet works, we only want you to check it for shipping damages.
So the customer waits two weeks until the plumber or contractor comes to install it to open the box and guess what?? Its broken.
They call us to tell us, but really there is nothing we can do. We have relayed through the site and every email that we send them the instructions on receiving the toilets, but they still find some way to make this our fault. We work very hard to hold up our end of the deal by offering great prices on INSTOCK items with excellent customer service. At some point the customer has to be held accountable for not holding up theirs.
Really to be honest this is not a typical story when you are ordering more than one toilet, because the freight truck drivers know that those have to be inspected at the time of delivery. This is more common in single toilet orders. If we could eliminate this issue, I feel like we would have no issues at all.”

Seems simple enough doesn’t it? Take a moment to read the policies but more importantly than that, no matter who you buy from or what you buy it makes sense to immediately check for damages and report it so that the replacement or refund can be made in a seamless and painless way.

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