I am a personal shopper. Customers who have an issue with their orders call a customer support center to get help. The support center is supposed to be all-powerful. They are able to access all the details from the customer’s order, and they have the authority to issue refunds, offer credits, and resolve all issues without involving us.
The only time they should ever call our department is if a customer has lodged a major complaint against a staff member and the support center needs to hear both sides of the story in order to resolve the issue correctly. This rarely happens.
This time, I’ve gotten a call from the support center that doesn’t make sense to me as the representative should have been able to see the issue on her end.
Representative: “Hello, am I speaking to Online, Pickup, and Delivery at [Store Location]?”
Me: “Yes. This is [My Name] speaking.”
Representative: “I have a customer, [Customer], on the line and she has an issue with her order. She picked up an order from your store an hour ago and is missing an item. I need to know if you’ll replace it for her.”
Me: “Let me look up her order. What is the item she’s missing?”
Representative: “It’s a [Brand] non-stick skillet for $19.95. Since you left it out of her order, I will remove the charge, but I need you to replace it. As soon as you confirm that she did, in fact, order one, I’ll tell her to drive back to pick it up.”
Me: “Yes, I see the skillet listed on the order. Look, her entire order is listed as pick-up except for the skillet, which is listed as three-to-five-day shipping, so no, she wouldn’t have gotten her skillet from us today.”
Representative: “What does that mean?”
The representative should be able to see that the item was listed as shipped on her end and should be able to see an expected arrival date. The whole point of the support center is that they have more access to customer information than we do so they can better help with major issues.
Me: “That means she ordered it along with the other items, but our store doesn’t have it in stock so it’s being shipped from a different store. A delivery driver will be bringing it to her house.”
Representative: “No, she only ordered pick-up, not delivery. Just go get one off the sales floor and I’ll send her to pick it up, free of charge, since your department messed up and inconvenienced her.”
I do not recognize the brand name, so I click on it. It takes me to a webpage for a different store location entirely. I send a coworker to check our kitchen appliance section to verify that we don’t actually have it, and they return saying there is nothing of that brand at all.
Me: “Ma’am, I can’t go get one. We do not carry that brand here.”
Representative: *Taking on a snarky tone* “You work at a [Store]. [Store] carries those skillets.”
Me: “Ma’am, we are a neighborhood market location, not a supercenter. We almost exclusively carry groceries. Our kitchen section is only four feet long and only contains the store brand, no name brands.”
Representative: “Oh. So, what store is her skillet coming from?”
Me: “I can’t be 100% sure, as there are four supercenters in this county, but the website is showing that [Store twenty miles away] has it in stock currently, so my guess would be from there.”
Representative: “What is that store number?”
I had to Google that, but the representative should have been able to look it up on her end. I don’t know why she didn’t, and I don’t know why she decided to be rude. I can’t help that I work at a market, which she should have been able to see on her end. I gave her the store number and she hung up on me without saying another word.
The customer called us directly the next day to let us know that a very nice delivery driver had brought her skillet from the store twenty miles away and that she was sorry for complaining about us. She just hadn’t realized she had chosen a skillet we didn’t carry.
