Friday Rant - Poor Customer Service

Like many gamers I purchase a lot of the paints, accessories and miniatures I want online. I personally feel that 'my' hobby has benefited from the growth of Internet shopping because I can search and find products that I might never have found at a show or in a FLGS. Maybe the product I want is very rare, or maybe its only available outside the UK. No matter where it is, how rare or obscure it might be, I can find it with the right browser search terms and a little patience. But it seems to me that some online retailers still have a lot to learn about customer service.

I should make it clear that I still think there is an important place in the high street for real game shops and that I still visit them and buy from traders at shows. Indeed I made a quick estimate of my hobby spending last year and three quarters of it was conducted face to face with traders rather than across the World Wide Web. The great benefit of direct purchases like this is the 'relationship' you have with the trader. I'm not suggesting they are my personal buddies or that we are on first name terms, but dealing with a human being rather than a web page is obviously a more interactive experience. I can get a feeling for what sort of business they run, how they deal with customers and whether they are 'my sort of people' (i.e. gamers themselves). Its hard to achieve that online, although it has to be said that many of the companies I buy from via the Internet I have previously bought from at shows and shops.

However sometimes I do deviate from online traders that I know personally. Sometimes the service and experience is excellent but recently I seem to have encountered online retailers that fall far below my expectations for good customer service. And when I talk about customer service I'm largely talking about good communication skills.

For me communication is everything because its part of building the 'relationship' between customer and supplier that the Internet doesn't normally provide. OK something has gone wrong, but this should be seen as an opportunity not a disaster. Its an opportunity to speak directly to the customer and reassure them that you care about their order and their loyalty as a consumer. For example my very first purchase from Skytrex was online and as it turned out there were issues that resulted in a delay in delivery. It eventually took close to four weeks from my miniatures to arrive, but I was OK with that because I received several emails notifying me of the problem and asking me how I would like to proceed. My needs as a customer were put first meaning I felt valued and I have happily placed several more orders with them since.

I have also encountered radically different experiences with other online retailers. Long period of utter silence; unanswered requests for information; inexplicable delays in delivery; 'customer account' pages that never get updated. I won't name names because they might just have been having a bad day, or there might have been perfectly reasonable issues I didn't know about. But as I'll never know what those issues were (because they weren't communicated to me) they have already lost my faith in them and I'll spend my money elsewhere.

I think that word faith is actually quite important here. When I buy in a shop or at a show I have the product in my grasp and all I have to do is hand over the cash. But with online purchases we relinquish our credit card details for products that we haven't even seen yet. We trust they have the stock they claim. We hope they will delivery promptly as promised. We assume that our order will be accurately met. In short we show faith that the retailer will live up to their half of the bargain. And when they don't (or when things go wrong and they don't reassure us with good communications) we feel all the more let down and disappointed as a result.