I’ve blogged about this kind of thing before. The situation where a company with shitty customer service actually uses the fact that tales of shitty customer service are so boring that few people can be bothered to tell them. Customer Service failure stories are like other peoples’ dreams… peppered with and thens and and so theys… and generally have poor narratives.
So, I’ll keep this tale of woe to some bullet points… that takes places over more than a year.
- I order printer cartridges from Retail Factory
- The blue explodes all over my brand new printer. It makes a very colourful mess and gets EVERYWHERE
- I complain to Retail Factory. They say it hasn’t happened before and send me a new blue… Yay! Retail Factory…
- The yellow explodes AND the red, I call up and they say the boss will get back to me
- He doesn’t.
- I call again and they say they had problems with the old cartridges and that they now have a new supplier and they’ll get back to me
- They don’t
- I call up again, and same story… by now the person that sold me the cartridges is long gone (they seem to have a very high turnover of staff btw)
- I call up again… and eventually give up and buy some new cartridges from somewhere else and write off the hundred quid or more they owe me…
…And that would be end of the story, except that…
- Retail then cold call me and ask why I haven’t bought any more cartridges. I explain the tale of woe… and they say, you guessed it… they’ll get back to me.
- I get a call. Hurrah…. Asking me why I haven’t bought any new cartridges. None of the above is on file. I tell the nice person on the phone that they owe me at least a hundred quid and that this situation is laughable… she says, “well at least I made you laugh”… I say, how’ this for funny…you have a week to call me back or I blog about it…
And so, there you have it. Boring as hell but not only based on a true story, it was a true story…. just a very dull and disappointing one. And this dull tale of woe was destined to be an untold story until they actively goaded me into blogging about how shitty Retail Factory are. They made me do it by trying to sell to me when there were still outstanding issues that nobody had dealt with.
If you are in the market for exploding printer cartridges or like dealing with what I think have to be the worst customer service EVER, then give them a call. They might make you laugh.
