A Customer-Service Saga
(NOTE: I am not posting anything here about the tragic events in Connecticut last week. That's because I don't feel that I have anything useful to say. It was terrible and I feel sad about it; what else is there? Onward....)
Over the past few days I had an "interesting" customer-service experience, to which I alluded on Facebook, and here, as promised, is the long version thereof. Did I say long? I said long, right? You know me, right? I get wordy. You might want to go pee before you click.
The Prologue
This year I've been encouraging my kids to learn about saving up their money to buy something they really want. Or perhaps I should say I've been forcing them to do it, since it's built into our allowance system. ;) I shall perhaps blog more about that later, and about Isaac's good experience saving up for a Nintendo 3DS, but that's not what I'm here to write about today.
The Product
Over the summer Ruthie starting seeing commercials for a product called DreamLites, and as she usually does, she came running to tell me that "I have a dot-com I want you to look at!" She directed me to dreamlites.com where I saw that the thing cost like $45 or something, so I was kind of like, "uhh I'll think about it" which is my standard response.
A DreamLite, btw, is a variation of a Pillow Pet. A Pillow Pet is a stuffed animal that can fold out into a pillow, or at least that's the idea (I'm not sure how many kids actually use their Pillow Pets as pillows). A DreamLite is a somewhat smaller Pillow Pet that has a hard plastic plate on the top that projects colored star-shaped lights onto the ceiling -- or, in Ruthie's case, the underside of the bunk bed. Dreamlites come in a variety of different animals, and despite having the Pillow Pets label, they actually make terrible pillows because of the plastic side and the hard box on the inside that contains the electronics and batteries. So it's basically a stuffed animal that emits light.
The Purchase...and the sudden yet inevitable betrayal
So at some point we were at CVS and saw that they had DreamLites on sale for $29.99, and they had the butterfly which was the one Ruthie wanted, so of course she asked for it, and I suggested that she could buy it with her saved money, and she agreed. So I bought it and reimbursed myself out of her savings envelope. She was very excited. We took it home and put batteries in it and tried to turn it on. The idea is that if you press the button once, it turns on to color-change mode, where it cycles through its three light colors every few seconds; if you press the button more times, you can make it stay on the color of your choice, or press the button once more to turn it off. (It also has a timer feature, whereby, regardless of which color mode you selected, it'll turn itself off after 20 minutes.) The first time we tried to turn it on, we had to press the button a few times before it would respond. But then it did come on and worked properly and Ruthie loved it and immediately brought it to her bed so she could watch the stars while she fell asleep.
But over the next few days/weeks the performance of the button deteriorated, to the point where you would have to press it a bazillion times, and if you were lucky it would eventually come on to the first mode (the rotating colors), but if it were an unlucky evening then you would press the button until your fingers almost fell off and the dang thing wouldn't turn on and finally Ruthie would say "oh never mind" and go to sleep without it. Forget trying to get the thing to single-color mode; I was lucky to get it to come on at all. Needless to say, this was annoying. And since the thing cost $30 and I wanted Ruthie to have gotten her money's worth and to learn not to just throw non-cheap things away if they don't work, I figured it was worth a little effort.
The Background Check and the Opening Salvo
I tried taking it apart with a screwdriver, but that didn't work. The box was sewn into the body of the thing. So I hunted down an email address and sent off an email. Incidentally, the DreamLites.com website is terrible. It has that "designed in 1998 by someone who was so proud of their brand-new html coding skills" look to it, and finding the relevant information is REALLY hard. The customer service link is in teeny tiny letters all the way at the bottom, and if you click on it, you get a snailmail address, a not-toll-free phone number, and an email address to use "if you have questions about your order." Hmm, well I didn't have questions about an order, so...I googled Ontel Products, which is the company that distributes the toy, found their website, and emailed their customer-service email address rather than the one shown on the DreamLites site. I did specify in my email that I had bought the product at CVS, not online.
Since it was at this point like a week and a half before Christmas, I figured I wouldn't expect quick turnaround, so I was surprised to get a reply within a few hours. It said basically "in order to receive a replacement, you need to send us three pictures: one of the tag on the product reading Ontel Products, one of the sewn-in Pillow Pets label, and one of the paws on the DreamLite." Hmm. Well, as I mentioned above, the product is a butterfly. Butterflies, as you may have discovered during your travels on our fair planet, do not typically come with paws. The thing does have four corners, which I suppose one could think of as paws, but I wasn't entirely sure if there was something else I was missing, especially since the corners are pretty nondescript so I couldn't see why they would want to see them.
Their email to me included an 800-number, so I figured I could give them a quick call and clarify about the paws. And this is where the real saga began.
That's What She Said
So I call the 800-number and the woman says "hello, Ontel Products," and I say that I have a DreamLites question, so she says "I'll transfer you to DreamLites support," whereupon I get a woman with an Indian(?) accent. I want you to know that in general I try really hard to be polite to telephone customer-support people, because their job sucks and generally the thing I'm upset about isn't their fault and often isn't within their power to change or fix -- HOWEVER, this particular woman was possibly the worst I've ever encountered.
She starts off the call by saying "hello, can I have the zip code on the order please?" so I said "Well my zip code is XXXXX but I haven't placed an order." Her: "Oh, so you want to place an order?" Me: "No, I don't. Would you like to ask me why I'm calling?" Okay, I realize that was perhaps unnecessarily snarky, but really! Isn't this Customer Service 101, you always start out with "how can I help you"?
So then I start to explain that I have a defective DreamLites and I want to get a replacement; and before I can even get to explaining the emails, she again asks me for my zip code and name. I could tell that she was trying to look up an order in her computer, so I said again that she wasn't going to find it because I didn't buy it online. I bought it at a store. She says, oh well then you have to return it to the store. This was my opportunity to finally get in the fact that I had emailed. I explained that I sent an email to customer service and they replied saying that I could get a replacement if...Now she isn't with me any more. I lost her somewhere around "email" because she's still stuck on "you have to return it to the store." She repeated this several more times. I stayed calm and said that what she was telling me didn't match up with what I was told in the email, which is that I can get a replacement sent to me if I send in these photos and I have a question about the photos they're asking me for.
She asks me what email address I used. I said that it was customer (at) ontelproducts.com. Her: "Can you spell that out for me?" Umm...Customer...(I say it very slowly)...at...ontelproducts, "you do work for Ontel, right?"...dot com. So now she tries to tell me that I emailed the wrong address, I should have emailed blahblah at dreamlites.com, which first of all is not even the same as the email address shown on the DreamLites site, but aside from that, as I said to her, "but if it were the wrong email address, why would they write me back and say 'yes this is how to get a replacement'? If it were wrong, they would have written back saying 'sorry you have the wrong email, you need to contact blahblah.'" This apparently was beyond her powers of comprehension, because she fell back again on "you need to return it to the store."
Me: "Well, I can't do that because the store will want the receipt, which I don't have, whereas this email is telling me that I can get a replacement if I send in these photos."
Her: (for the thousandth time) "Ma'am, if you ordered* the product at the store then you need to return it to the store."
* (She seemed to keep getting confused between ordering and buying. I didn't "order" it at the store, I just picked it up and bought it!)
At this point, again I know this might have been too snarky but I literally said to her, "Please stop saying that I need to return it to the store. You have said that many times now and I understand you. I just don't agree that this is what I need to do." She puts me on hold. Okay, I wait. I get familiar with the hold music. She comes back and says again that I need to return the item to the store and they cannot help me. I say again that the email had a different story, and now I ask to speak to her supervisor. She puts me on hold again. She comes back and says that her supervisor is busy, do I want to wait? I say okay.
I guess at this point she thought that she had put me back on hold, but she didn't press the button, so I get several minutes of hearing her breathing and sighing and chatting in a foreign language with someone nearby, including giggles. I can also hear other people in the background, presumably also handling customer-service calls. Eventually she realizes that she didn't put me on hold, so she does. I listen to hold music for another while.
That's What He Said
Then the supervisor comes on the line. This time I try to cut directly to describing the email. I say that I have a defective DreamLite and I sent an email and was told to send three pictures and have a question about one of the pictures. He seems confused, but is following me better than the woman was (not that that's saying much). He says, okay what's the question. I say, "well it wants pictures of the paws and I don't know what that means. It's a butterfly, it doesn't have paws." He's confused. He keeps saying confused stuff like, "you need to take a picture of the product."
me: "Yes but what part of the product?"
him: "The uh, the labels and uh, the product."
me: "But what does it mean by paws?"
him: "Well uh, it wants pictures of the labels and uh,"
me: "Yes, it says a picture of the Ontel label and the sewn-in label, but then it also says the paws."
Then he goes, "ma'am, uh, what kind of email was it that you received?" I swear to ghu, he said this.
me: "I don't understand that question. I don't know how to answer that. I sent an email to customer (at) ontelproducts, and this is the reply that I received." (I read out verbatim the bit about the three pictures)
him: "Well, you uh, well...Ma'am, you need to send some pictures." (I swear this bit is verbatim!)
me: "I understand that, and my question is about those pictures. I'm asking you what it means by paws. P-A-W. Do you know what a paw is?"
him: "Yes, yes, of course. Cats have paws."
me: "That's right. But butterflies do not. My item is a butterfly."
At this point I think he finally actually understood what I was asking, but he didn't know the answer and had nooooo clue what to do. So he asked if he could put me on hold. I said sure.
In Which I Do What I Should Have Done At The Beginning
To be honest, by this point I felt that I had wasted way too much time trying to make myself understood to these people on such a simple question, but I stuck with it out of sheer, I don't know, pigheadedness or something. He put me on hold, but for some reason I didn't get hold music this time, just silence. So I put it on speakerphone (did I mention I was in my office) and while I was waiting, I used my cellphone to take photos of the two labels, and another photo of the four corners ("paws") of the thing all pressed together, and a fourth photo of the front/top.
Then the guy came back on saying "Hello? Ma'am?" and by this point I had almost forgotten that it was on speakerphone, so his voice coming out of nowhere startled the crap out of me. ;) So I picked it back up, and he blithered at me that I should just forget the third photo and just send the photos of the two labels. While I was uh-huh'ing him, I pulled up the email I had gotten, hit reply, attached the four photos, wrote a little blurb saying that "I wasn't sure what you meant by paws so I hope these pictures are okay," added in my mailing address, and sent it off. Then I said to the guy, "okay, thanks for your help" and hung up.
The Reply
Within half an hour I got a reply by email, saying that my info was received and I should be getting the replacement item in 7-10 days.
The Conclusion
Pillow Pets and DreamLites are a great example of a small company that starts to fall apart when it gets too big. If you read through customer comments on these items on Amazon or other sites, you'll see stories about items being sold out, orders never being filled, phone reps who can't tell you when the item will ship, etc., etc. -- So, what happened in my case was that I was dealing with two different companies. The person or people replying to my emails were at Ontel Products, which is a large corporation that handles fulfillment for a lot of different products. This company knows what it's doing; it has experience handling a large volume of product and a large volume of customer-service inquiries. If a customer says they have a defective product, and is willing to jump through a rather minor hoop, it's easiest for Ontel to just send out a replacement product and call it good. So their system is designed around this. Probably, a significant portion of people who email once, will never reply with the photos, so the number of replacement items that Ontel has to send out is minimal. Their system works smoothly (although really I reserve judgment on that statement until I see whether we actually receive the replacement) and all is well.
The Pillow Pets company, on the other hand, is a small company that started making this one product and got popular, brought out their second product (DreamLites), and was not prepared for how much demand there would be. Especially as Christmas drew near. As the volume of products increases, so will the volume of customer-service inquiries, whether for defective items, returns, new orders, problems with orders, or what have you. So I'm guessing that they brought on a bunch of new customer-service staff, who barely know how to do customer service to begin with, let alone the specifics of this particular company and situation. That would certainly explain the woman I talked to, who not only didn't follow typical cust-supp procedure, but was incapable of adapting to the situation when the customer (me) did not respond correctly to the canned line that she kept repeating.
None of that, of course, can explain the stupidity of her telling me that I emailed the wrong address, or the guy asking me what "kind" of email I got. I'll put those down to them being dumb. *eyeroll*
I shall of course update you if/when the replacement DreamLite arrives!
Over the past few days I had an "interesting" customer-service experience, to which I alluded on Facebook, and here, as promised, is the long version thereof. Did I say long? I said long, right? You know me, right? I get wordy. You might want to go pee before you click.
The Prologue
This year I've been encouraging my kids to learn about saving up their money to buy something they really want. Or perhaps I should say I've been forcing them to do it, since it's built into our allowance system. ;) I shall perhaps blog more about that later, and about Isaac's good experience saving up for a Nintendo 3DS, but that's not what I'm here to write about today.
The Product
Over the summer Ruthie starting seeing commercials for a product called DreamLites, and as she usually does, she came running to tell me that "I have a dot-com I want you to look at!" She directed me to dreamlites.com where I saw that the thing cost like $45 or something, so I was kind of like, "uhh I'll think about it" which is my standard response.
A DreamLite, btw, is a variation of a Pillow Pet. A Pillow Pet is a stuffed animal that can fold out into a pillow, or at least that's the idea (I'm not sure how many kids actually use their Pillow Pets as pillows). A DreamLite is a somewhat smaller Pillow Pet that has a hard plastic plate on the top that projects colored star-shaped lights onto the ceiling -- or, in Ruthie's case, the underside of the bunk bed. Dreamlites come in a variety of different animals, and despite having the Pillow Pets label, they actually make terrible pillows because of the plastic side and the hard box on the inside that contains the electronics and batteries. So it's basically a stuffed animal that emits light.
The Purchase...and the sudden yet inevitable betrayal
So at some point we were at CVS and saw that they had DreamLites on sale for $29.99, and they had the butterfly which was the one Ruthie wanted, so of course she asked for it, and I suggested that she could buy it with her saved money, and she agreed. So I bought it and reimbursed myself out of her savings envelope. She was very excited. We took it home and put batteries in it and tried to turn it on. The idea is that if you press the button once, it turns on to color-change mode, where it cycles through its three light colors every few seconds; if you press the button more times, you can make it stay on the color of your choice, or press the button once more to turn it off. (It also has a timer feature, whereby, regardless of which color mode you selected, it'll turn itself off after 20 minutes.) The first time we tried to turn it on, we had to press the button a few times before it would respond. But then it did come on and worked properly and Ruthie loved it and immediately brought it to her bed so she could watch the stars while she fell asleep.
But over the next few days/weeks the performance of the button deteriorated, to the point where you would have to press it a bazillion times, and if you were lucky it would eventually come on to the first mode (the rotating colors), but if it were an unlucky evening then you would press the button until your fingers almost fell off and the dang thing wouldn't turn on and finally Ruthie would say "oh never mind" and go to sleep without it. Forget trying to get the thing to single-color mode; I was lucky to get it to come on at all. Needless to say, this was annoying. And since the thing cost $30 and I wanted Ruthie to have gotten her money's worth and to learn not to just throw non-cheap things away if they don't work, I figured it was worth a little effort.
The Background Check and the Opening Salvo
I tried taking it apart with a screwdriver, but that didn't work. The box was sewn into the body of the thing. So I hunted down an email address and sent off an email. Incidentally, the DreamLites.com website is terrible. It has that "designed in 1998 by someone who was so proud of their brand-new html coding skills" look to it, and finding the relevant information is REALLY hard. The customer service link is in teeny tiny letters all the way at the bottom, and if you click on it, you get a snailmail address, a not-toll-free phone number, and an email address to use "if you have questions about your order." Hmm, well I didn't have questions about an order, so...I googled Ontel Products, which is the company that distributes the toy, found their website, and emailed their customer-service email address rather than the one shown on the DreamLites site. I did specify in my email that I had bought the product at CVS, not online.
Since it was at this point like a week and a half before Christmas, I figured I wouldn't expect quick turnaround, so I was surprised to get a reply within a few hours. It said basically "in order to receive a replacement, you need to send us three pictures: one of the tag on the product reading Ontel Products, one of the sewn-in Pillow Pets label, and one of the paws on the DreamLite." Hmm. Well, as I mentioned above, the product is a butterfly. Butterflies, as you may have discovered during your travels on our fair planet, do not typically come with paws. The thing does have four corners, which I suppose one could think of as paws, but I wasn't entirely sure if there was something else I was missing, especially since the corners are pretty nondescript so I couldn't see why they would want to see them.
Their email to me included an 800-number, so I figured I could give them a quick call and clarify about the paws. And this is where the real saga began.
That's What She Said
So I call the 800-number and the woman says "hello, Ontel Products," and I say that I have a DreamLites question, so she says "I'll transfer you to DreamLites support," whereupon I get a woman with an Indian(?) accent. I want you to know that in general I try really hard to be polite to telephone customer-support people, because their job sucks and generally the thing I'm upset about isn't their fault and often isn't within their power to change or fix -- HOWEVER, this particular woman was possibly the worst I've ever encountered.
She starts off the call by saying "hello, can I have the zip code on the order please?" so I said "Well my zip code is XXXXX but I haven't placed an order." Her: "Oh, so you want to place an order?" Me: "No, I don't. Would you like to ask me why I'm calling?" Okay, I realize that was perhaps unnecessarily snarky, but really! Isn't this Customer Service 101, you always start out with "how can I help you"?
So then I start to explain that I have a defective DreamLites and I want to get a replacement; and before I can even get to explaining the emails, she again asks me for my zip code and name. I could tell that she was trying to look up an order in her computer, so I said again that she wasn't going to find it because I didn't buy it online. I bought it at a store. She says, oh well then you have to return it to the store. This was my opportunity to finally get in the fact that I had emailed. I explained that I sent an email to customer service and they replied saying that I could get a replacement if...Now she isn't with me any more. I lost her somewhere around "email" because she's still stuck on "you have to return it to the store." She repeated this several more times. I stayed calm and said that what she was telling me didn't match up with what I was told in the email, which is that I can get a replacement sent to me if I send in these photos and I have a question about the photos they're asking me for.
She asks me what email address I used. I said that it was customer (at) ontelproducts.com. Her: "Can you spell that out for me?" Umm...Customer...(I say it very slowly)...at...ontelproducts, "you do work for Ontel, right?"...dot com. So now she tries to tell me that I emailed the wrong address, I should have emailed blahblah at dreamlites.com, which first of all is not even the same as the email address shown on the DreamLites site, but aside from that, as I said to her, "but if it were the wrong email address, why would they write me back and say 'yes this is how to get a replacement'? If it were wrong, they would have written back saying 'sorry you have the wrong email, you need to contact blahblah.'" This apparently was beyond her powers of comprehension, because she fell back again on "you need to return it to the store."
Me: "Well, I can't do that because the store will want the receipt, which I don't have, whereas this email is telling me that I can get a replacement if I send in these photos."
Her: (for the thousandth time) "Ma'am, if you ordered* the product at the store then you need to return it to the store."
* (She seemed to keep getting confused between ordering and buying. I didn't "order" it at the store, I just picked it up and bought it!)
At this point, again I know this might have been too snarky but I literally said to her, "Please stop saying that I need to return it to the store. You have said that many times now and I understand you. I just don't agree that this is what I need to do." She puts me on hold. Okay, I wait. I get familiar with the hold music. She comes back and says again that I need to return the item to the store and they cannot help me. I say again that the email had a different story, and now I ask to speak to her supervisor. She puts me on hold again. She comes back and says that her supervisor is busy, do I want to wait? I say okay.
I guess at this point she thought that she had put me back on hold, but she didn't press the button, so I get several minutes of hearing her breathing and sighing and chatting in a foreign language with someone nearby, including giggles. I can also hear other people in the background, presumably also handling customer-service calls. Eventually she realizes that she didn't put me on hold, so she does. I listen to hold music for another while.
That's What He Said
Then the supervisor comes on the line. This time I try to cut directly to describing the email. I say that I have a defective DreamLite and I sent an email and was told to send three pictures and have a question about one of the pictures. He seems confused, but is following me better than the woman was (not that that's saying much). He says, okay what's the question. I say, "well it wants pictures of the paws and I don't know what that means. It's a butterfly, it doesn't have paws." He's confused. He keeps saying confused stuff like, "you need to take a picture of the product."
me: "Yes but what part of the product?"
him: "The uh, the labels and uh, the product."
me: "But what does it mean by paws?"
him: "Well uh, it wants pictures of the labels and uh,"
me: "Yes, it says a picture of the Ontel label and the sewn-in label, but then it also says the paws."
Then he goes, "ma'am, uh, what kind of email was it that you received?" I swear to ghu, he said this.
me: "I don't understand that question. I don't know how to answer that. I sent an email to customer (at) ontelproducts, and this is the reply that I received." (I read out verbatim the bit about the three pictures)
him: "Well, you uh, well...Ma'am, you need to send some pictures." (I swear this bit is verbatim!)
me: "I understand that, and my question is about those pictures. I'm asking you what it means by paws. P-A-W. Do you know what a paw is?"
him: "Yes, yes, of course. Cats have paws."
me: "That's right. But butterflies do not. My item is a butterfly."
At this point I think he finally actually understood what I was asking, but he didn't know the answer and had nooooo clue what to do. So he asked if he could put me on hold. I said sure.
In Which I Do What I Should Have Done At The Beginning
To be honest, by this point I felt that I had wasted way too much time trying to make myself understood to these people on such a simple question, but I stuck with it out of sheer, I don't know, pigheadedness or something. He put me on hold, but for some reason I didn't get hold music this time, just silence. So I put it on speakerphone (did I mention I was in my office) and while I was waiting, I used my cellphone to take photos of the two labels, and another photo of the four corners ("paws") of the thing all pressed together, and a fourth photo of the front/top.
Then the guy came back on saying "Hello? Ma'am?" and by this point I had almost forgotten that it was on speakerphone, so his voice coming out of nowhere startled the crap out of me. ;) So I picked it back up, and he blithered at me that I should just forget the third photo and just send the photos of the two labels. While I was uh-huh'ing him, I pulled up the email I had gotten, hit reply, attached the four photos, wrote a little blurb saying that "I wasn't sure what you meant by paws so I hope these pictures are okay," added in my mailing address, and sent it off. Then I said to the guy, "okay, thanks for your help" and hung up.
The Reply
Within half an hour I got a reply by email, saying that my info was received and I should be getting the replacement item in 7-10 days.
The Conclusion
Pillow Pets and DreamLites are a great example of a small company that starts to fall apart when it gets too big. If you read through customer comments on these items on Amazon or other sites, you'll see stories about items being sold out, orders never being filled, phone reps who can't tell you when the item will ship, etc., etc. -- So, what happened in my case was that I was dealing with two different companies. The person or people replying to my emails were at Ontel Products, which is a large corporation that handles fulfillment for a lot of different products. This company knows what it's doing; it has experience handling a large volume of product and a large volume of customer-service inquiries. If a customer says they have a defective product, and is willing to jump through a rather minor hoop, it's easiest for Ontel to just send out a replacement product and call it good. So their system is designed around this. Probably, a significant portion of people who email once, will never reply with the photos, so the number of replacement items that Ontel has to send out is minimal. Their system works smoothly (although really I reserve judgment on that statement until I see whether we actually receive the replacement) and all is well.
The Pillow Pets company, on the other hand, is a small company that started making this one product and got popular, brought out their second product (DreamLites), and was not prepared for how much demand there would be. Especially as Christmas drew near. As the volume of products increases, so will the volume of customer-service inquiries, whether for defective items, returns, new orders, problems with orders, or what have you. So I'm guessing that they brought on a bunch of new customer-service staff, who barely know how to do customer service to begin with, let alone the specifics of this particular company and situation. That would certainly explain the woman I talked to, who not only didn't follow typical cust-supp procedure, but was incapable of adapting to the situation when the customer (me) did not respond correctly to the canned line that she kept repeating.
None of that, of course, can explain the stupidity of her telling me that I emailed the wrong address, or the guy asking me what "kind" of email I got. I'll put those down to them being dumb. *eyeroll*
I shall of course update you if/when the replacement DreamLite arrives!