Mucky waters.

By
Amy Parker / Creative
Mucky waters.

When I wrote about my good customer experience some weeks ago, in the back of my mind I wondered how long it might be before I had a bad customer experience. Well, my bad customer experience happened last week.

The good thing is that it's given me some absolute gold to write about across the socials.

A company should always put itself in its customer's shoes, so to speak (or in my case, boots).

Here's what happened to me:

  1. Purchase and wear new boots
  2. New boots start to leak and I become fed up with wet socks
  3. Contact retailer – who are still yet to reply. Surely, we all vet our distributors, right?
  4. Contact manufacturer and receive a standard, cut and paste email asking me to send them things (details, codes, images)
  5. Send the manufacturer the things they asked for and get another cut and paste email: "as your purchase was not made on the website I need to refer you back to the retailer".

I feel unheard, cast aside and slightly foolish for jumping through hoops when all along the conclusion seems to have been pre-determined. In this case: "because we operate as a separate entity to the wholesale of X Company and your purchase was not made on the website".

Maybe at the start of our conversation, they should have said: "X Company? No, that's not us. You must be confused. Our name is XCompany, all one word, without the space and that's totally different and so we can't help you."

Seriously.

When you are building a brand, you have to not only think about things such as logos, colours, fonts, images and layouts, but also where your ideal customers will find you and how you will interact with them. This all goes on behind the scenes.

When you unleash your brand into the world (outside of appearances), one of the most important factors of your brand should be how you interact with your customers.

Now I don't know how much they spend on marketing and building a community around their brand each month. Or how much the branding cost them in the first place. But I do understand that its all totally superfluous at the point of where customer service meets the consumer.

Oh dear.

And my takeaway from their brand?

Wet socks! :)

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