This Customer Never Always Right, Wrong but Now Pissed Off
A five-month twice-ordered 20+ email futile effort to get a $5 keychain
That scratched, worn piece of metal has been a lucky talisman of mine, a constant companion, and has been my keychain for maybe ten years. Two Allen wrench nubs and some hex nut holes make up a small bicycle tool, but the most worn part is the bottle opener.
Bicycling is a portion of my online persona: cogdogblog.com, @cogdog, cog.dog.
For a daily creative prompt site I help run, the Keychain Story has been a useful introductory activity (first, second, third time used) we use in an DS106, online open digital storytelling course. It’s a simple open prompt- publish a video to YouTube:
Show us your keychain and tell us a story about the keys and/or things you have on it.
It was really meant to get people new to the class posting a simple video and get in the practice sharing a small personal story.
The unexpected surprise was how a small prompt was an opening to something more. And there was a bonus of early in an online course of seeing people’s faces, in their homes, often with pets and kids around them.
Many of us who teach DS106 hold the value of doing the same assignments we ask of students, so I talked about my keychain here while traveling around the country in 2012.
With my storytelling colleague Barbara Ganley, we used this in an activity for a workshop at the Baruch College Schwartz Communication Symposium. It was successful beyond our expectations in helping people telling stories from their heads to doing it from their hearts.
Once set loose with the prompt, the room of a passive listening audience erupted into a cacophony of keychain stories shared in small groups.
I have gotten a lot of use out of this keychain.
And I have already written too much here about my silly keychain.
Ironically, I do not recall every using it on my bicycles (the Park MT-1 Tool is more useful!).
I was dismayed in August when the precious bike tool fell off my keychain! It was so worn that the top metal loop opened up.
I had purchased the keychain long ago at the REI store in Phoenix, but I could not find it listed in the web site anymore. This is where the internet sometimes just provides for you; in a comment for my flickr photo of the broken keychain tool my friend @pumpkiny chimed in, as she often does, with something helpful.
www.everbuying.net/product642801.html Sketchy website (feels like they are scraping your entire identity), but there it is…
But yes, it was listed on the Everbuying site for (then) a whopping price of like $5 and change. It seemed worth a try, so I ordered it on August 6, 2015.
Having not received it by late September (the last tracking status was something line “on a ship from China”), I went to the area of the Everbuying site for Customer Service. Submitting something mean I had to create an account on their site (sigh, why? I know).
Their response was that I should wait.
Okay, I was leaving for 6 weeks of travel. Surely my replacement $5 keychain would be there when I returned home in early November 2016.
Nope.
I filed another ticket, including a screenshot of the shipping status which still said “on a ship from China”).
They told me to check with my post office. I know how my local post office works; if they habve a package for you, they leave a Little Brown Slip in my box. But, I dutifully checked.
I filed another ticket with Everbuying explaining I had not received the keychain.
They did respond with an apology and offered to send the item again.
I anticipated joy.
I left for more travel and returned home after Christmas. There was a small envelope in my box from Everybuying. Finally! I was excited to see my new lucky keychain.
Look what I got.
On the left is my old keychain. On the right is what they sent, not what I ordered.
Isn’t this clearly a mistake? Compare the green item they shipped with what I ordered:
Would I keep trying? For the $5 keychain (which by now was priced at $2.57). I was this far in, why quit?
They do respond quickly, I will give them that.
This is not a warranty issue, they made an obvious mistake and delivered the wrong item. I no longer had the packaging (I burn my paper in the woodstove) and I had already sent them a photo of their mistake.
So now I feel Rage Customer rising inside of me.
And thus the SOP for dealing with irate customers- repeat what you told them the last time.
And thus I admit defeat. I shall never get the $5 keychain I ordered from Everbuying. In terms of my time and theirs, we have easily exceeded the cost it would take them to ship me the item I ordered.
And I do not think I will risk giving them another $2.57.
No matter, I went to my shed, took out my vice grips, and manually closed the loop in my original keychain. It has stayed on my keychain for the 5 months Everbuying flubbed my order.
And this gets me to the old cliché mantra that The Customer is Always Right.
“The customer is always right” is a motto or slogan which exhorts service staff to give a high priority to customer satisfaction. It was popularised by pioneering and successful retailers such as Harry Gordon Selfridge, John Wanamaker and Marshall Field. They advocated that customer complaints should be treated seriously so that they should not feel cheated or deceived. This attitude was novel and influential when misrepresentation was rife and caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) was a common legal maxim.
:
However it was pointed out as early as 1914 that this view ignores that customers can be dishonest, have unrealistic expectations, and/or try to misuse a product in ways that void the guarantee and states “if we adopt the policy of admitting whatever claims the customer makes to be proper, and if we always settle them at face value, we shall be subjected to inevitable losses.” The work concluded “If the customer is made perfectly to understand what it means for him to be right, what right on his part is, then he can be depended on to be right if he is honest, and if he is dishonest, a little effort should result in catching him at it.” An article a year later by the same author addressed the caveat emptor aspect while raising many of the same points as the earlier piece.
The thing is when people write about this, they tend to make it an absolute. Which is a stupid argument. Of course customers can be irate assholes that are a waste to deal with. Is that the right starting position?
Yes there is an “always” in the line, but I would expect something like:
Treat the customer like a human being, as if they are reasonable and have a valid complaint, until they start acting like pretentious irate cussing assholes.
Yeah, I crossed the line. So I am now wrong. Pumpkiny did warn methat Everbuying was “sketchy” (she is right).
Oh well, it feels good to vent.
My keychain luck has run its course.
