It was a practical Christmas between me and my children: I bought furniture for one daughter, a washing machine for the other and clothes for my son. What was interesting was the difference in delivery skills between Crate & Barrel, where I got the furniture, and BestBuy, where I got the washing machine (washer, in retail parlance).
Crate & Barrel did a perfect job of scheduling, communicating, and executing the delivery of the furniture. Perfect. Even to the point of delivering both in printed and email form, detailed instructions for how to take care of the furniture.
BestBuy did a fine job of selling me the washer. After that, it was clear that the company's systems for delivery haven't been updated in years, which is surprising since they have a well-designed system for buying merchandise online and picking it up in the store. The problem: They couldn't distinguish between the buyer and the recipient. When my daughter called yesterday to reschedule delivery (because she and her room-mate were both working today), BestBuy said I was the only one who could change the delivery, even though it was being delivered to her house in a different city and state. She left me a voice message telling me this yesterday. I forgot to call until this morning, the day of the scheduled delivery.
When I called the toll-free customer service number, there was no option for delivery services and the customer service person I ended up with told me that I had to reschedule with the local store doing the delivery. (Irony: The remote buyer has to reschedule delivery with the local store. That makes a lot of sense.) She couldn't forward my call to the store, so I had to call the local number. (On Vonage, it doesn't cost me extra but....) When I called, at 8am local time, the store wasn't open and there was no way to leave a message. There is no system online for rescheduling deliveries; the order status page has a link for "Track This Order" which merely shows you the delivery address, but no tracking information.
I called the local store back at 10am, when the store opened. The auto-attendant didn't provide an option for delivery, didn't even provide an option for white goods department (just TV, camcorders, and something else). In other words, the phone was programmed to steer you to three departments, but any button you pushed lead to exactly the same young lady, who answered "BestBuy customer service", when she answered after 6-8 rings.
The first time I called, the young lady said "just a minute" and transferred me to an extension that didn't answer after 20 rings. Pressing "0" didn't reroute the call. So I had to hang up and call back to get the same young lady (which is why I know that you can press any of the buttons to get the same lady). She told me that this time she would page the warehouse, put me on hold, where I listened to (thankfully) non-holiday music for about five minutes, before I was transferred back to the same lady, who clearly didn't know that it was still me, since she answered "customer service" in her cheerful manner.
Oh, she said, "Let me run back to the warehouse and find out what's going on". Suffice it to say that she came back on the line after another five minutes or so (ran fast, I think) to say that the truck had already left with the washing machine in it and that they would try to track down the driver on his cell phone. She asked me for my daughter's cell phone, got my phone number, and our names. I asked her to reschedule delivery directly with my daughter.
What a mess! All to help BestBuy avoid delivering a washing machine to a place where there was no one to receive it. In my cynical moments, I imagine that BestBuy will return the washer to the store and charge me or my daughter a failed-delivery charge or another fee to re-deliver. Wouldn't you think that a company as big as BestBuy could figure out how to track deliveries and redirect them so that their trucks and drivers didn't go to the wrong location or so they would have fewer delivery failures and happier customers? Crate & Barrel proves that it is possible to do with big, bulky items delivered from stores or online, so it's not rocket science.
Kudos to the cheerful young lady at the local store for figuring out how to overcome her employers lousy information systems (both for tracking deliveries and for managing incoming phone calls to the store) to provide cheerful customer service anyway.
