Customer Service – Unbelievable
Oh the shock of it all! How about the Mom who buys her daughter an iPod for her birthday from Target, only to find ‘rocks’ inside the box when the girl opens her present. Back to the store it goes, another iPod is exchanged but Mom is smarter this time. She opens this iPod box in front of store employees only to find another one filled with rocks! No refund, sorry says the clerk. Target policy is to give a store credit but not your money back. Target must have rocks in their head!
Me worry? No way says the lady who calls Dish Network to cancel her service after her home is leveled in one of the recent California fires. The rep asks if she was able to remove her Dish equipment before the home burned. No answers the victim You’ll have to pay $300 on your next bill for the destroyed equipment because it says so on my computer screen and there are no exceptions. Say what? Sure, at the next fire I will let my family burn to death while I remove the Dish receiver!
Lost your cell phone? No biggie. Just buy another. Or in the case of one woman pay a huge cell phone bill. Seems that while this lady was on vacation, thieves made off with her cell phone back home. They run up a $26,000 phone bill on the stolen phone. Cingular says ‘Our customers are responsible for unauthorized charges before they contact Cingular.” There is no law to protect consumers like when your credit card is stolen. But there should be one for cell phones also.
Comments welcome.
4 Comments
Cyber Trekker
October 30th, 2007
at 4:04pm
On the sole matter of refunds. In Australia it is illegal for businesses to state, advertise or even infer that they don’t give a refund, because here the customer is entitled to a refund so long as it is not merely for change of mind.
Although a business is well within its rights to present to the customer the options of either a refund, repair, exchange or even store credit, at least in Australia it is up to the customer to decide which they want to take advantage of, This, however, doesn’t stop businesses from trying to tell the customer that it is their policy that they don’t give a refund. Business, as usual, is so willing to break the law itself, but they are the first to jump up and down about the customer’s responsibilities and to threaten legal action. This is typical of the prevailing tendency of business hypocrisy in our extreme and perverted capitalistic civilisation.
What would it hurt to give a refund? I would imagine that if one treats the customer with a respectful form of decency, then that customer is more likely to return. the quick profit paradigm stands on economically shaky ground and is in reality counterproductive to business as it is to profit. Yet those immersed in the extreme and perverted form of capitalism of which we have as a running paradigm in the modern world cannot see that they are in effect cutting their own throats in the short and the long term. Greed blinds business to that which is both rational and honest.
Ron Schenone
October 30th, 2007
at 6:30pm
Hi Cyber Trekker,
Good points. Thanks for the comments.
dee
November 8th, 2007
at 11:07pm
on the second story…the one with the dish in the fire…I heard on TWIT that it got in the news, and as a result the company backpedaled and said it was an inexperienced customer rep, who made up the policy.
yeah, sure! Like those customer reps don’t have those policies right in front of them as they speak to you. Sounds like they threw that employee on the bonfire!
Anyway, she got her money back…
Ron Schenone
November 9th, 2007
at 6:28am
Hi dee,
Thanks for the update. The one good thing about bad press is that companies do listen.
Regards, Ron