06 November 2015

Are You a Total Bigot?

I guess I am.  I'm going to go ahead and say that if you don't have a very fluid and understandable-to-the-natives grasp of the English language, you oughtn't be teaching or working in customer service. Just pass me my hood here, it's obvious I'm a total bigot.

Recently I got some "excellent customer service" with Amazon, or so I thought at first.
I got an order of finish dishwasher cleaner that somehow exploded in transit.  See how one of the bottles is empty and the box is ruint?  Yeah, so was the other stuff in the order.  Of course, the computer in charge of returns wants you to mail it back to them.  No way postal regulations would allow such a thing as it was drippy and I don't know that it was even safe to touch.

No worries, when I finally found an actual human to speak with, "Jack" took care of that.  I thought I had clarified that 1. I needed all the items in that shipment sent out again; and 2. I could not return the items as they were fit for nothing but the trash.

A day later, I got good news!  A bunch of stuff in another order was on its way to me!  Fer free!  They're sorry about the mixup.  I browsed through the list and yeah, I was getting a bunch of expensive stuff but not the stuff I was missing and really, it wouldn't be right to accept even if it did mean a fair bit of my time would be wasted playing "find the human" with Amazon.  Again.

Back with customer service.  Yay!  Someone who sounds like she's from Minnesota or somewhere.  She sent the stuff I ordered over and cancelled the expensive item order, no problem!  What I forgot to do was to clarify that look, the previous guy didn't speak English, do check to be sure they aren't expecting a return of this original shipment.  (But I shouldn't have had to have done that, right?  I didn't even think on it at the time.) 

Sure enough, two weeks later I got a "bad customer" letter, demanding the return of the finish dishwashing stuff and the other things ordered that were ruint.  More calls to customer service. 

I think I've finally gotten it sorted, but what a mess!  Wouldn't it have saved everyone some time, trouble and aggravation to just hire native English-speakers for the customer center job in the first place?

Today I wrote to the people at Walmart.com about being unable to find any mens' shoe size 13 socks on their website, and the difficulty I found navigating it so that it didn't redirect me to boys' socks.  Here's the response I got.  Read it and let me know if 1. You feel it adequately answers the "where are these socks?" question; and 2. if it doesn't sort of make it sound like I'm some crazy psycho who cares a little too much about socks:

 "We always appreciate customers who take the time to give us their feedback. Please be assure we will work on our webiste in order to solve this type of issues you are having. I know this socks are important for you, and you are having trouble to find them, please accept my apologies for this issue." 

 








6 comments:

  1. ruint?? what kind of English is that? Tsk Tsk, the word is ruined.
    Fer free. Fer?? really?
    That Walmart reply looks like it was translated literally from the Chinese version.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fer serious! I kept having to repeat myself and say the same thing over and over again. It was nuts.

    I think the Wal-Mart people have an army of children overseas who reply using google-translate. :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sounds like a frustrating experience for sure!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, not the worst thing one can go through, but frustrating. :)

      Delete
  4. I hate it things go wrong.
    Complaining is such hard work .
    Merle...........

    ReplyDelete

Non-troll comments always welcome! :)

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