How not to treat your clients
Good products should work. It doesn’t matter if you bought a space rocket or you know, a keychain
I’m not an impulsive buyer. The one time I bought on impulse, I helped a bad company do business at my expense. I’ve spent around 10 euros so, not that bad, but still, I was left with a sour taste in my mouth because I felt like someone treated me like a dumbass.
I fell for the CreativeKeys Insta-trap. You know those keychains designed like the icons of software? Damn, they looked cool, so I decided to treat myself to one. Plus, my Nordea Bank keychain that came with the apartment I rented had disappeared.
There were so many options, but I decided to pay homage to my long-gone days as a print designer and got myself an InDesign piece. To this day, I still think no other software handles copy as good as InDesign does. Plus, the Sketch App keychain didn’t look as hot as the CC suite ones.
Before you say it, I’ll say it myself: These are not licensed goodies. With the benefit of hindsight, I should have checked that first but damn that urge to buy it fast. Had I checked it, I’d know about their 70% negative ratings with some 30% very shady approvals ratings. That’s virtually 100% terrible reviews.
Just like Flavio Lamenza, I’m big on colorful, loud shirts. I lived in Colombia for a while, and that’s heaven for bold pattern shirts enthusiasts. Unlike Flavio, I did not write this fantastic article about Instagram shops that were basically the same. They all go by different names, but you can even find the same products in some of them.
So I got my keys on a Monday, after a few weeks of waiting. It seemed cool enough — I even posted it on my Instagram Stories.
As any human being would, I attached my keys to the built-in keychain clip and introduced it to its new home in my right side pocket. The left side is for my phone, so there’s no risk of having it scratched.
On that same week’s Friday, the damn keychain broke while in my pocket. I was at the playground running with my daughter when I heard the unmistakable sound of a keychain breaking.
Needless to say, I was pissed. I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong; after all, keychains are supposed to be kept in pockets, aren’t they? So I took my phone, snapped a shot and sent CreativKeys this email:
I got my keychain last Monday. Today is Friday and this is what happened. I’m not happy wit it. It is unusable now.
I was so mad I even misspelled “with” but I’ll get away with it by saying I was listening to QOTSA’s “Make it wit chu”
Less than an hour later, their “Creativkeys Support Black Belt” wrote me back:
Hello Daniel!
Is the product broken upon arrival? If so we will resend you a new one as soon as possible.
With Love & Joy,
Natalie
Creativkeys Support Black Belt
I knew where this was going. Had I lied and said it was broken upon arrival Natalie would have just used her Black Belt skills and do the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique to send a new keychain my way. But instead, I did the unthinkable and told her the truth. Here’s my response:
Nope. It broke while in my pocket. It is frustrating because pockets are where keychains should be, right?
Right?
Then, Natalie came back to me and pulled a very White Belt move:
That is true, but of course, anything can break if the right amount of force/pressure is applied to it.
With Love & Joy,
Natalie
Creativkeys Support Black Belt
Oh, the nerve!
By the tone of her comeback, I knew I’d never see my money back, so I skipped that ask and went straight into just send me a new one, and we can call it quits. I reasoned like this:
Are you not going to send me a new one? I think that would be fair given I only used it for 5 days
And then, her final blow:
Heya Daniel,
Like most retail policies, we do not offer replacements due to customer’s negligence. We can only refund/resend products lost in transit or products damaged upon arrival.
With Love & Joy,
Natalie
Creativkeys Support Black Belt
NEGLIGENCE? That pissed me off. Negligence is when you don’t take proper care of something which clearly was not the case here since the thing was in my pocket and not on my cleat. This is no way of treating a customer.
Maybe Amazon spoiled me. There was this one time I bought a book and it never arrived. I wrote to them and, no questions asked, they sent me another one. After a while, the first book came, and I wrote back saying I would be happy to return the extra one. “Keep it” they said.
I obviously had no use for two copies of the same book, but the gesture was great. And I ended up giving “The Psychopath Test” by Jon Ronson to my then-girlfriend now wife.
That would be an endless discussion, so I cut my losses. In the end, it cost me $10,16 between product and shipping to learn to never buy on impulse again and moreover, always check the store’s reputation.
You see, that’s the thing about good design: it doesn’t matter how much it costs, what matters is if it solves your problem or not.
Now I had a problem. A practical one (I don’t have a keychain) and an ethical one (Should I try to fix this piece of crap that was dealt by bad vendors?), and I decided maybe I could find a good compromise.
And so I drilled a new hole into the thing. I thought about Natalie while I was doing it. For a second, I imagined that keychain as her palm and the drill head getting into… let me stop here; this is getting gruesome.
In the end, I felt like The Office’s Michael Scott when he fell for the Nigerian Prince email scheme so I laughed at it.
