Unfiltered Story #313632

Yesterday I had a customer in my store who had a broken espresso machine. He wanted to exchange it for a working one. And of course he didn’t have a receipt.

I won’t exchange a machine of that value without proof of purchase. Since those machines get stolen a lot from stores or maybe it was purchased years ago and out of warranty. So to give him a chance I ask if he has a withdrawal he can show me (we can look up receipts if I have a date and time). He didn’t since it was his mother’s purchase. I asked if it was purchased with our customer card. It might have been.

Now sadly I can’t look up purchases made per card. Customer service however can. So I advised him to call them to see what they could do.

About an hour later, customer service called me. Asking to check a few dates. Our (stupid) system allows them to check dates/times and value bought. But not specific receipts. So she gave me dates and times. I looked at the receipts to see if the machine was on them.
I taught myself how to work that system on the spot, since my training hasn’t covered it yet. Not that difficult to learn, but it took 10 minutes to find the right receipt. But we found it!

Half an hour later the man was back in the store getting his machine replaced. It took a lot longer than I wanted it to. And I felt pretty guilty having to send him away. But he was happy.

Today my colleague asked me to come back into the store. I was on my break and pretty annoyed after a day of everything going wrong and then being interrupted, yet again, on my break.

It was the man’s mother. Who is a regular customer who is always lovely and I’ve helped before. She wanted to thank me personally for helping them so well. Save to say I was touched and it made an awful day a whole lot better. She’s the type of customer that makes going the extra mile worthwhile.