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“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.” Mahatma Gandhi

All companies boast of customer support. They have dedicated lines, toll free numbers, website links and email ids to help customers at the time of product dissatisfaction, service, complaints and feedback. With more people preferring the email and web way of raising their complaints,  most of the companies have options to help the customers the eway.

I raised a complaint regarding bad service and rude staff behaivior at a Spencer store in Bangalore. I wrote my feedback down on the book they have kept at the store, on page 37( this is important read on..). After a week I visited the store again and out of curiosity opened the book only to find that page 37 is missing. All the other pages with customer feedback was there except page 37. I talked to one of the staff and asked them on the missing page for which she replied “I did not tear it”.

Me “I didn’t say you tore it off, was just asking on where the page is. Now I am sure someone tore it off”

She “I did not tear it”

Me “Can I see your manager?”

Out came the same person who was rude to me the week before that and introduced as the manager of the store. I asked the same question.

Manager “It was there”

Me “Where is it?. I am sure none of the customers are going to tear it off ”

Manager “I did not tear it, why are you blaming me”

Me “I want to talk to your Manager”

On this, the manager called the store ‘general manager’ who said he will take appropriate action on it.

I sent an email to the email id given on the spencer site. The last line read “I hope you acknowledge and respect my comments and not just send this email to thrash just like what happened to Page 37”

And they did. They sent it to thrash.

I sent a similar feedback to GK Vale customer care on how their store ruined the photoframe order that I gave. No reply.

I think many of these email ids should have warnings posted on their site as “Warning : Please do not sent emails to this id as it would go to an unmonitored mailbox.”

But some companies are prompt in replying to customer emails like Tata Indicom and Vodafone. Tata Indicom also has a forum where we can post our concerns and it would be addressed in 2 working days.

From all this I learned one thing, the snail mail still helps. All complaints send as snail mail would be read and acknowledged (read most of them). May be the customer service is been bombarded with customer emails that some of the emails are missed out. I think the customer support also consider snail mail as documentary evidence and take it more seriously than the emails. So next time you want to write a complaint out, write a snail mail.

Tags: bangalore, customer care