When I got thanked for giving lousy customer service
Customer service is something of a passion for me. We try to hold every decision against a simple standard. ”Does this represent outstanding customer service?” If the answer is “no” we try to rework it.
Sometimes it hurts. Like when a customer returned a tube of sunscreen because the expiration date was 2 months off, even though we knew the product would be good for another year. Still, we took it back, and sent a replacement. Sometimes we fall short of the standard, but we always try.
And then there are those times when we are just unable to give the kind of customer service we want to.
We carry a line of stainess steel water bottles. A couple of years ago, when the news about Bisphenol A (BPA), the harm it causes, and the fact that almost all plastic water bottles and kids’ sippy cups had BPA, Our Stainless Steel water bottles became instantly popular.
Suddenly, the bottles were flying off the shelves, and our inventory was almost depleted. No worries, we thought, the supplier is also in CA. It takes two days for the bottles to ship from them to us. So, when we got a few orders for bottles that didn’t exist, we weren’t particularly concerned. Until our supplier told us that they would not be able to fill our order for six weeks.
Meanwhile, the orders continued to pile in until we deactivated the products. When the dust had settled, we had 60 orders we couldn’t fill, and we wouldn’t be able to fill them for a minimum 6 weeks. We had never been in that position before.
We emailed our customers, and told them the situation, apologizing profusely. A few cancelled, but most took a wait and see attitude.
Over the next several weeks, we emailed our customers every week to 10 days with the latest news from Klean Kanteen. Mostly, there was no real news.
Then, finally, we started to get our Kanteens. As we were shipping them out, we ran into a few problems. For example, a credit card associated with one of the orders had expired. We contacted the customer, to get the new information, and that’s when it happened. She thanked me for giving such great customer service.
I said “What? We are 6 weeks late shipping you an order. That’s terrible customer service”
Her reply “But you kept me informed of what was going on, and that was great.”
All in all, about 6 of our 60 orders were cancelled. We offered some discounts, and upgraded some orders from Parcel Post to Priority Mail. and we learned a lot.
While we never want something like this to happen again, and we have gotten more careful about deactivating products that are out of stock, we learned that communication is the single most important thing for a customer.