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The Daniel Group Blog

The Way NOT to Handle Customer Service

January 30, 2012 Posted by The Daniel Group in : Service Improvement , trackback

There are ways to take care of customers and ways to do it that are not effective. My wife and I purchased furniture from Pottery Barn in 2006. Frankly, it was not well made. We had new cushions made for the furniture. The furniture performed so badly that we finally replaced it. My wife kept promising to let Pottery Barn know about our experience. Below is the response we received from Pottery Barn.

“I apologize, if we find quality issues with our products we will stop selling them or have the vendor make corrections. I am sorry things did not work our for you in 2006.

If we may be of any further assistance, please contact us via email. Alternately, you may contact our Customer Service Department directly at 1-800-922-9934 from 5:00 am to 9:00 pm (PST), seven days a week.

Kind regards,

Nancy Gay

Pottery Barn

Customer Service

Your incident ID for this email is 3647784″

Now, I will leave it to the readers of this blog to decide what they would have done in this situation. I can tell you it has made me very unwilling to return to Pottery Barn.

Lynn

Brand trends : social media emerges as the default channel for customer service (simplyzesty.com)
Are customer service agents too rude? (eptica.wordpress.com)

Comments »

1. Dan Waldron - January 30, 2012: Great post. I will read your posts frequently. Added you to the RSS reader.
2. Marty Yuzwa - January 31, 2012: Yeah. That’s a pretty crappy letter. . .