Do Businesses Want Our Help?

I have honestly started to wonder lately if businesses really care about what their customers say. Customer Service is all the rage right now. All the businesses are talking about how important customer service is and how they want to improve customer service. But I don't think they really do and I'll tell you why.

Story #1
I got rear ended a while ago and had to get some body work done on my car. I brought it to a popular location (Sherwood at the Auto Mall) and asked them to fix it. They took the paper work and I made an appointment for 3 weeks later. 3 weeks later we bring the car in, we get a rental car and they say it will be ready Wed. Wed afternoon rolls by and Shiela goes by there on her way home for work to get the car. "Oh, it's not ready yet," they say. "We just found out that we had to fix the frame and not just the bumper so we had to order more parts and get SGI to approve it so it will take longer. It will be done Thursday or Friday." Friday afternoon rolls around and about 4:30pm Shiela phones down to see if the car is ready. They say it is done but not detailed yet, so we can either keep it there for the weekend or else pick it up dirty and get it cleaned another day. She reminds them that we have a rental car and they then say that we should probably pick the car up then as SGI won't cover the rental car for the weekend since the car is technically done.

Shiela tells me this and so we decide to pick up the car. But I also decided to phone down there to talk about their customer service. The part that made me upset was that they never, ever phone us to tell us what was going on. When our car wasn't ready on Wed, they never phoned to let us know it would be a few more days. They weren't even going to phone on Friday to tell us our car was ready and then we would have been charged for the rental fee because of that. I told the manager that they were showing extremely poor customer service by not informing us of what was happening and that we always had to be after them to find out what was going on. The best part is that when we phoned Friday at around 4:30pm he said we needed to come by 5:00pm to pick up the car because they close at 5:00pm for the weekend. I asked why he didn't phone to let us know and he said he had a list of 7-8 other people yet that he hadn't phoned to tell them their cars were ready. So now it was past 4:35pm on Friday and he still was going to phone 7-8 other people to tell them that they needed to get down to the shop in the next 25 minutes or else they couldn't get their car. I told him that was poor customer service. What did he do...nothing...and he really didn't seem to care.

Story #2
The other day at Extra Foods in the Lakewood Suburban Centre I went to buy some toilet paper. After analyzing it all I chose the PC brand that said it was very soft. The price was around $7.30 for 24 rolls. I went and paid for it and it came to $8.29 (before tax if there was any). I decided to go back and look at the shelf to see if I had been mistaken on the price. Nope, I was right. I looked a bit to my left and saw some toilet paper there for $8.50 or so. I then looked at the tags even closer and saw that one of them was for 140 sheets per roll and the other was fofr 170 sheets per roll. Same brand and everything, but ironically the 140 sheets was more expensive. I then looked even closer and noticed that they had piled up all the 170 sheet packages in line with the price for the 140 sheets and vice versa. So not only was the price they were charging wrong, they even had them all stacked wrong so unless you paid extremely close attention you were bound to grab the wrong item.

I decided to go tell the store manager that both their price was wrong and more importantly, the items were all stocked on the shelf wrong. After waiting around 10 minutes for the store manager to arrive, I finally managed to explain to her the situation and that she may want to look at the way the items are stacked as it is deceiving and in the wrong places. She looked at me and then asked if I wanted to exchange what I had bought. I looked at her dumbfounded before just saying yes and I went and got a different roll that was cheaper. However, ironically, I ended up getting the Purex brand that had more rolls in it with the same # of sheets per roll for even cheaper. The problem was that on the shelf there was no price tag at all. So I came back and asked for a price check on the Purex rolls and told her that this brand didn't have any price on it. She just scanned it and asked if I wanted that one. And yes, I did.

Now after typing these stories I feel like maybe I'm being too picky. However, I was not mad in either situation. I only was talking to them to let them know there was an issue and that they may need to improve their customer service. I was only trying to help, but neither business really seemed to care.

I'm not sure what I was trying to accomplish, but I now feel that it is not worth it to try to help a business. As consumers, I guess we should just suffer in silence, take our business elsewhere and leave these businesses always wondering why they are losing customers...because they just dont' listen.