Adventures In Customer Service: Loose Screws
When Lain was born, our parents chipped in and bought us a pretty nice crib from Graco. During the process of moving from House #1 to House #2, the screws to said crib got misplaced. Since we weren’t going to stay in House #2 for very long, we didn’t really sweat it. Our first house out here in the east, on the other hand, we will be in for at least a year and perhaps longer. Plus, baby turned 1 a few days ago and we’re going to need to start moving her over to her own bedroom instead of the playpen/nap-pen by our bed.
The screws hadn’t turned up, so I contacted Graco. Graco, in turn, said that even though it carried their brand name, they didn’t actually make the crib and instead it was made by a company called LaJobi. LaJobi couldn’t help me until I tracked down some information from the crib. That took a while because the crib was still in a mountain of boxes. When I finally did, they told me to call them.
Here is how I think the conversation went: I told them that I would like to purchase a screw set for the crib. They said “Let’s check and see if we have that in stock” which they did. They took my credit card information for the $35 the screws would cost.
I hadn’t asked how long it would take it to arrive, so I decided to give them the 6-8 weeks I consider to be the maximum. That came and went, and it still hadn’t arrived. I called them back to find out that this is how they thought the conversation went: I told them that I would like to purchase a screw set for the crib. They said “Let’s check and see if we have that in stock” which they did not as it was on back order. They may or may not have taken my credit card information, but they delete credit card information after 24 hours. I went back and looked and sure enough, the $35 had never been charged.
Basically, they said that the interaction was put into their system as a backorder. did I misunderstand them? It’s possible, though I am sure they took my credit card information and I certainly left the conversation thinking that my screws would be on their way. Anyway, they said that the screws were still on back order. However, they would open a new crib box with a set of screws and send that to me, since I had been waiting so long.
I was really impressed that they would do that, since that would mean that they couldn’t sell the crib from which they got the screws until they got more screws in. I almost felt bad since apparently this particular set of screws is such a hot commodity. And since it was our own fault for losing the screws in the first place. I was very appreciative, gave them my credit card number, and then waited the 7-10 business days it would take for them to get the screws to me.
Then, nothing. And I check my records, and once again we were never charged.
Now, as I say, it’s my own darn fault for not keeping track of the screws during the move. Neither Graco nor LaJobi have any obligation to offer replacement parts. But it’s been three months since they first (I am pretty sure) said that I would be getting the screws. If they can’t replace the parts, I wish they would have just said so and we could have made plans accordingly, instead of planning for the arrival of the screws.
In the end, it worked out. Over last weekend, when I was waiting to call LaJobi back and giving them a piece of my mind, the screws I had originally lost magically turned up. It’s possible that had LaJobi been straight with me, I would have purchased a new crib by now. It’s also possible that I would have gone on a blitz and located them. I can’t even boycott LaJobi going forward since we didn’t intentionally buy their product in the first place. We own a lot of Graco products and I had previously looked at their brand favorably. While they weren’t the ones that gave us the runaround, though, they contracted with the ones who did and that makes me less likely to buy their products in the future.
On the other hand, I will say these two things for LaJobi: First, the crib is pretty awesome. Good work on that. Second, the LaJobi people were very polite and pleasant and had they not been telling me things that were not true, I am big into customer service and the customer service would have had me buying LaJobi in the future.
I feel your pain. There was an interval early on in our married life when we moved eleven times in ten years. Sometimes on our own and sometimes by pros contracted by the navy.
Screws go in a Ziploc and that gets taped to some big piece of the whatever. Took a while to work out something like a system and it never went perfect. The more stuff we accumulated the worse it got.Report
Our crib was also from a LaJobi subsidiary. We purchased it through BuyBuyBaby. I made several phone calls to the company when we were researching the product to ask questions and always received prompt, friendly, and knowledgeable service. We have not yet had to order replacement parts, fortunately. There was a mixup in our initial order, in which we were sent the conversion bedrails instead of the toddler rail we had ordered. It is unclear whose mixup this was, but it was resolved relatively quickly. And since we did not have an urgent need for the missing piece, “quickly” is a very relative term.
Did you need specific LaJobi screws? My brain tells me you probably could have found equally secure screws at Home Depot. But my gut (and the entirety of my wife) tell me to use the exact screw when it comes to things like baby furniture.Report
We were about to try to go that route before the screws turned up. The tricky part was the washers, which appeared to be very much designed for the crib.Report
BuyBuyBaby
I’m not sure if that’s the best business name ever or the worst.Report
Worst. After visiting the site and finding out what they really sell, I am extremely disappointed that I won’t be able to easily purchase all the necessary materials to complete this Halloween “witches’ cauldron” now.Report
My wife and I joke that if we went in there, we would find racks of blister-pack babies ready for purchase, like My Little Pony toys. Try the special Blind Box Baby–one in ten gets the Secret Type! Collect them all, trade with your friends!Report
I’ve noticed this phenomenon. Some companies seem to understand that customer service is important and encourage their employees to go above and beyond for the customer, but that doesn’t always translate into competence.
The flip side of that is some companies that people perceive as having great customer service never actually interact with their customers (e.g. Amazon).Report
If I had to guess, what I think happened is that the agent scrambled to make the situation right, and then a supervisor found out what they did and squashed it. Which is understandable, but the right thing to do in that situation is to call me back (they had my number).Report
I will say I’m somewhat surprised the overall experience wasn’t better, given that you were dealing with a company specializing in baby materials. Given the vast harm that can and will be wrought upon these companies if they do screw up, my assumption (and experience) has been that they work really, really hard to “do the right thing”. It is simply bad for business to end up with baby blood on your hands.
Even the $35 charge surprised me. As I wrote about a few months back when I had a run of amazingly positive customer service experiences, we had a baby specialty company send us something that we weren’t necessarily even entitled to for free because of a miscommunication somewhere in the chain between them, Amazon, and myself. My hunch is that as a company that A) specialized in baby stuff and B) which was trying to outcompete a company whose product was the Kleenex* of the market, they had every incentive to write up $20 to maintain positive buzz.
* Boppy seems to be the common term for those C shaped pillows nursing mothers and babies use. We bought from a non Boppy competitor but still call it our Boppy. That is what they are up against.Report
Eh. I would say that baby thing makes it *less* likely for them to send you the parts. What if they send you the wrong kind by accident and it presents a safety hazard? Or they send you the right ones but not with the instructions again?Report
FTR, they did send me the instructions again (a PDF by email). That part went swimmingly.
The potential liability is probably why they would never, ever recommend that I get regular screws. I would have been fine if they’d said “Here’s what you can get from Home Depot”… but I can see why they didn’t.
It’s also, probably, why they wouldn’t really do much of anything for me until I could identify the precise crib. Not just model number, but also manufacture date because I guess even the same model numbers are changed up over time. Also, by giving them a product serial number and a manufacture date, they could be absolutely sure that I was a customer and that I was relaying the correct information.
On the other hand, the cribs are self-assembly, so people Doing It Wrong is either something they have a degree of indemnity from, or have factored in to the costs of doing business.Report
My thought is that if I ever needed a crib, I’d make one with a plexiglass side.
Of course, I’m not really anticipating anyone asking me to make them a crib, but I think it’d be kind of cool.Report
Vikram,
Re: Amazon.
I love their customer service. It’s only mattered once, but they did a great job. Someone in the Middle East hacked my account and tried to order an expensive video game or some such. When I checked my email one morning I had a notice that the some such had shipped, which was a puzzler since I hadn’t ordered it, and I had a subsequent email from Amazon saying they had stopped the shipment and refunded my account because there was fraud. They caught it and fixed it before I knew anything about it. So in that case great customer service meant I didn’t even need to speak to them.
Contrast that with BillMeLater. I had somebody hack my account, reported it, was told they didn’t see any evidence of fraud and refused to refund my money, when I wanted to cancel my account I had to call them, and when I explained why I was canceling my account the person said they didn’t see any record that there’d been any report or investigation of fraud. Somehow that person thought making a report might persuaded me to keep my account, but as I pointed out to them, to me it only meant the company had fucked up multiple times.
It’s a curiosity to an old-fashioned cat like me, but speaking with someone turns out not to be the primary indicator of good customer service.Report
Yep, exactly that. People *say* they want to be able to call customer service and talk to a human in English without an accent, but what they actually want is to not need to call.Report
I’ve interacted with Amazon customer service multiple times and always come away satisfied.
Of course, I have rarely (in comparison with total number of transactions) needed to, which is even more satisfying.Report
I’ve read several articles talking about the latent growing Amazon threat but man it’s hard to get very worried about it when they are so easy to use. If Amazon conquers the world maybe we’ll see some efficiency improvements at least. Or maybe I’ll see my left wing brethren protesting to protect Walmart.Report
I, for one, welcome our new Amazonian overlords.Report
You do know that they recently just increased their free-shipping threshold to $35, right?
Of course, people love Amazon so much that in a thread I saw about it, people were talking about how much more valuable it made Prime for them.Report
Prime is los pijamas del gato. The components for my Dr. Horrible costume rolled in today.Report
I just discovered that now when I went to place an order. Thankfully, I found something else I needed for cheaper than it would cost me in the store, and which allowed me to get the other thing I wanted with free shipping, also cheaper than in the store, and all of this without any driving. Wow.Report
“I’ll see my left wing brethren protesting to protect Walmart.”
At least Walmart keeps the jobs in the community.
It’s funny how localism used to be something free-traders used as a reductio for protectionism, until it became a real thing. Now we’ve been forced to retreat to using household autarky as the reductio. But it’s just a matter of time.Report
You do realise you’ve generated something any corporation would pay thousands of dollars to get. You may bet the farm this has already reached LaJobi’s PR/SEO people.Report
Do you mean free advertising BP or something else?Report
You can’t buy a review like this, North. It’s the holy grail of SEO.Report
I think he means knowledge about what bothers customers. There is probably no single place where an experience like Will’s is documented within the company. Should the company find this post though, they will be alerted to multiple areas in which they weren’t doing as good a job as they might have thought they were doing. Internally, they were probably treated Will as three different cases all resolved appropriately, but Will’s explanation destroys that illusion.Report
Vikram has hit the nail on the head. This post will be handed all around that firm, what went right, what went sideways.Report
The LaJobi people would probably have preferred that I focus more on their good crib and less on the gaps in their customer service, but it’s not a total loss.
They were aware that I was the same person. On the second call, they looked up the first call.
If they take this criticism constructively, the lesson is probably “It’s not a bad idea to have more screws on-hand” and “We shouldn’t let customers wait for screws that aren’t going to arrive” and find out why that happened.Report
Thing is, if it were merely a compliment, the Bayesian algos would probably treat it as a paid advert. But it’s not. The screws got there. That’s what’s important, the customer was satisfied. But their system didn’t turn the problem around as quickly as you’d have liked, which now lets the firm examine their CRM system to lag trace why you didn’t get them sooner. Failure analysis, with a happy ending. Almost unheard of. That’s why it’s a holy grail.
Someone demonstrated some initiative and broke protocol to keep a customer happy. The Graco -> LaJobi connection is working. The CRM system coped, found your first call, means their CRM is working. LaJobi broke open a box to retrieve a set of screws. Knew where to find the box to break it open. Probably had to get some sort of override to get into Inventory to do it, that will be noted, too. Next time, they’ll have a bin with packets of screws in them so they’re not breaking into inventory. That will go up the production line. Lots of stuff to learn from this incident.
Watch and see. Betcha someone from LaJobi will turn up here shortly.Report
My post was not clear. I never got the screws. Rather, I found the ones that I had lost. I’ll go fix it for clarity.Report
Ah… that’s different. The screws turned up at your end. Now the decision tree in the flow chart of failure leads to the Search for Culprits, ha ha.Report
@will-truman, I totally got that you found the loose screws — both the ones you lost and the loose screws in their customer service.
My comment to this whole post is that the complex, industrialized supply chain is not very efficient at helping individuals source parts when they need them, despite the blessings of the internet.Report
Wow, 1 year old. Time flies.Report