Is Getting Good Service With A Carpeting Vendor Impossible?
September 9th, 2006 | by david |One would think that purchasing carpet for your home, apartment or condo would be a good experience met with great customer service. After all, this is a pretty big expense – most certainly in the thousands of dollars. It is also a purchase that is ripe for upselling and add-ons.
One would also think that a company that is doing a huge advertising blitz over Labour Day Weekend offering 30% off of all carpeting would be staffed enough to help one customer with their carpeting purchase. ONE customer…yes, just us. However, when we walked into Lowes last weekend, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see tumbleweeds rolling around. It was like a ghost town. Almost no customers, and even fewer people to help us.
Our Carpet-buying story out of the Twilight Zone
Our Condominum is about 10 years old. When it was built, “they” obviously put “realtor grey” carpeting in our unit. Carpet that looks good for about a year, and sells well for an empty unit, but not the top-of-the line stuff. So, with two pets, and a small child, and the prospects that we will be moving within the year, we decided to get new carpet. We figured with the real estate market being so bad right now, maybe we could fix up the place and rent it out for a few years.
We saw a commercial for a local operation and decided to call them. We were met with a very rude and unhelpful employee on the phone. “Can I help you?” in the most irritated voice you can imagine. I have a pretty low tolerance for shenanigans such as this, so the call lasted only a moment or so before I hung up. I thought to myself “No biggie, I’ll find someone else.” Well, this is a bit more of a biggie than I thought. We live in a pretty big metro area, and oddly enough, there aren’t many Carpet outlets in our area.
Frustruated, I kind of forgot about our carpet ambitions for a few weeks. This was until I saw Lowe’s advertizing blitz on T.V. over Labour Day weekend. “Save 30% on all flooring and carpeting.” My wife and I both thought that Lowes is a big enough operation that we would get some decent customer service. By “decent” we mean someone who is courteous, and somewhat knowledgeable about their product. We are pretty easy going people and we have both worked customer service jobs in our lives, so we know that it can be a difficult job.
We decided to go over to Lowes on Sunday morning, about an hour after they opened. We figured if we got there before the church crowd, it might not be as busy and we’d be able to take care of business quickly. We walked in, and it was a ghost town. Seriously, there was almost nobody in there. We thought that was great for us, though. The flooring department should be able to help us quickly and get us on our way.
Walking through the aisles, it slowly became apparent that there weren’t any employees either. Usually in these types of stores (comparing to Home Depot) there is an employee at every corner eager to help. Here, I don’t think we passed one person who was on the clock. We finally got back to the flooring department, and there were three chairs around the desk and computer area, but not one employee to be found. We thought we would use the time to look at carpet while we waited for them to come back. Bathroom break, we thought.
About 20 or so minutes passed and nobody came back to the flooring department. We then decided to go to the customer service desk to see if they could perhaps page someone to come help us. The response we got was mindblowing. “It isn’t my job to keep track of these people.”
At that point, my wife and I agreed that Lowes had lost the opportunity to have our business. We left the store and drove away, leaving a pretty empty parking lot. Strange for a Sunday at mid-day, but with the service that we recieved that day, we were pretty sure that others had experienced the same.
Too bad. Lowe’s had the product we wanted. There was just nobody there to take our money…….