One area where my customer-service demon really falls down—or is extra-tricky, depending on your viewpoint—is the matter of service calls and deliveries of large items.<\/p>\n
When I purchased a bed last week, we asked about delivery options, and the salesguy told us that his delivery people always showed up during the scheduled 4-hour window. \"Once,\" he told us, \"we even got a sort of complaint that they showed up too early.\"<\/p>\n
Aha,<\/span> thought I; I'd better be there early.<\/span> 'Cause almost every time I've ever had a four-hour (or two-hour) window for some service or delivery person to show up during, they've arrived early. Except for cabs, which once in a while fail to show up at all. But even with cabs, a cab once arrived half an hour early to pick me up, saw someone else waiting at the curb, assumed that was their passenger, and drove off with them.<\/p>\n So today's delivery was scheduled for sometime in the 8 a.m. to noon time block. I was up past 1:30 clearing out space in my room to make it possible for them to deliver a bed, then set an alarm and woke up around 7:20. Dragged myself out of bed at 7:30, moved a few last items out of the way, went downstairs at 7:40, only to hear my doorbell rung, twice in rapid succession. I opened the door, and the delivery guy was on the verge of leaving; he had already put a \"Sorry we missed you\" tag on the door. \"Were you out earlier?\" he said.<\/p>\n \"I was asleep,\" I said. \"I was expecting you between 8 and noon.\"<\/p>\n \"Yeah, well we had three cancellations,\" he said.<\/p>\n On the one hand, he continued to be surly the whole time they were here. On the other hand, they did nicely move my futon downstairs (which would've been a big pain for me to do even with help), and the entire operation from my opening the door to their leaving took only about ten minutes.<\/p>\n On the \"Sorry we missed you\" card, they didn't write in a time when they were here, just circled \"a.m.\"; then they wrote \"Call B-4 8:15 a.m. or call to reschedule We are around the corner at donut shop.\"<\/p>\n If I hadn't heard the doorbell when they rang it, I probably wouldn't have seen the card 'til midafternoon, if then. A card on the door is only a timely contact method if the person you're trying to contact is outside when you put it there. To be fair, I suppose they assumed I was outside. It looks like they left me phone messages, but I unplug my phone at night to avoid being woken up by wrong numbers (which used to happen regularly). But I suspect they didn't ring the doorbell earlier; it's pretty loud, and I'd be surprised if I slept through it.<\/p>\n Anyway. It did arrive, and they were very helpful and efficient, and the whole thing—including the blogging of it—is done practically before I was expecting it to start, so I can't really complain. Any more than I've just done, anyway.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One area where my customer-service demon really falls down\u2014or is extra-tricky, depending on your viewpoint\u2014is the matter of service calls…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}