Dear Lowe’s,
I like you better than Home Depot because your customer service is better than theirs. Or, at least, I thought it was. Perhaps I was wrong.
When a customer orders a product through your web site, it is not OK to wait nine days before calling to inform the customer that the product has been discontinued. If it’s discontinued, then why are you advertising it on your web site? And why wasn’t that call made within at most a day after the order was placed?
When you do finally call the customer, you should leave a direct call-back number or at least an extension, so that the customer doesn’t have to go through your annoying phone menus and incompetent operators to try to reach you.
Speaking of those incompetent operators, when they tell the customer they’re going to “try again” to transfer the customer to the right person, after said right person didn’t answer the phone on the first attempt, it’s a good idea for them to actually try again rather than leaving the customer on the phone in limbo for several minutes and then silently hanging up on him.
Sincerely,
A dissatisfied customer who has taken his $300 purchase, including a high-margin extended warranty, elsewhere
P.S. When you subsequently call the customer to apologize and claim to have refunded the charge to his credit card, it’s a good idea in a case like this to refund the entire purchase price, not the price minus a 15% restocking fee for a product that never existed and was never delivered. Smooth move, that. Your charge-back department will be hearing soon from my credit card company.
