Recently I had an exceptionally bad customer service experience at the EE (formerly Orange) shop in Nottingham.
Previously that week my wife had gone to the shop to get an upgraded phone for my daughter whose iPhone was two years old (yes, I am in that situation where my kids are getting iPhones).
Just as a little bit of background, we have been Orange / EE customers as a family for getting on for 15 - 20 years and we have never felt the need to switch or change. We have given them lots of money and our lifetime value to the company is enormous; I also have a business which utilises mobile technology.
When my wife got home from the shop she had bought an 8g iPhone for my daughter, which is the way all iPhones seem to be going, but my daughter likes to have storage because she takes a lot of video (of her horse). We quickly realised that with a 4g operating system, 8g of storage was not going to be enough on the phone and therefore we needed to take it back.
I happily went into the shop to explain that we would like to pay for the larger phone and upgrade on the upgrade. I was very polite when I entered the shop and saying to the assistant that I hoped she would be able to help me. Immediately the shutters came down and the hand came up: "you can't change your phone, we don't ever change phones".
I asked to see the manager immediately as I was struck by the aggressive nature of the assistant. The manager came straight across, turned my receipt over and said "it says on the back of your receipt that we don't exchange phones" I asked about the cooling off period which he told me I would get if I ordered the phone online or over the phone but not when bought from a shop. At this point I got irate and really angry. No-one was prepared to listen to my story whatsoever, they just spouted the line from the management handbook. I asked if they would listen to my concerns but they said "no, we don't exchange phones".
I then told them that they would exchange my phone. To this point the manager said "no, we won't" and I left the shop. On walking away I read the back of the receipt which said that if there was a coverage problem related to my phone they would exchange it but only within 14 days.
I went back into the shop and said that my daughter was unhappy with the coverage, They typed my postcode into the computer and told me that I was a liar (I was actually lying as the coverage was fine but I wanted the phone exchanged but I found it interesting that they are happy to call a customer a liar) and they assured me that under no circumstances would they be changing the phone.
I then went away and tweeted about the poor customer service at EE and entered into a tweet conversation with someone who advised me to call the customer services line. I asked them to get the customer services line to call me and they said they were unable to do that and I would have to ring 150 and speak to them.
In the end my wife spoke to customer services and explained the situation, they said they would email the shop and ask them to exchange the phone as 'a gesture of good will' and the shop telephoned us to say they would be happy to exchange the phone.
Why does it take jumping up and down? Why does it take shouting? Why does it take lying? Why does it take confrontation to get people to listen to your story?
The person in customer services looked at our account, realised they didn't want to lose us and emailed the shop to tell them to change our phone. That conversation could have been had immediately in the shop and I would never have to write a blog about the s*&t customer service that EE provide and to advise people never to go to the shop again.
We should all learn a lesson from this; in the first instance listen to the story. If they had listened to the story that day and said to me "I am really, really sorry but we're told that we cannot exchange phones, please leave this with me and i'll try my very best to see if we can change it in this situation" then I would have been delighted with the effort they had made but nobody could be arsed.
Always give your staff the chance to make decisions for themselves based on the story that they hear.