Now IÂ’ve got through to those in charge the conclusion of my lastminute.com complaint has been swift and efficient. I got a call of apology and then later this email explaining the situation, which in the interest of balance I quote in full:
“Dear Mr Herring,
Further to our telephone conversation this morning, I again would like offer my sincere apologises for the inconvenience, and embarrassment you may have experienced as a result of your order not arriving within the expected timeframe.
I offer no excuse's for length of time it has taken to resolve the matter, or the poor customer service received by some of our staff at lastminute.com. However, I would like to explain the events surrounding your order and the outcome of my investigations.
Having spoken with the supplier for your gift, they have confirmed that due to a technical error at their end, several order batch report's were wiped from their internal system. Upon receipt of your first email we contacted our supplier, whom confirmed they were experiencing a technical error, but would respond as soon as they could retrieve the details. Unfortunately, despite several calls they were unable to give a definitive answer as to why your gift was not delivered, and they were not able to confirm despatch or delivery status.
We except that full responsibility lies with lastminute.com to ensure we meet our customer's expectations on receipt of a purchase, regardless of how we source the product. We do expect all suppliers to be reliable, and provide good's within expected timeframes. I have forwarded this example to our Product director for his perusal.
I was very concerned to learn, that the e-mail response's from our staff were at times vague and the question's you raised unanswered. Please be assured that we recognises that this was not / and is not acceptable, and is currently being addressed with the relevant staff members. It is clear we fell below our normally very high levels of customer service. I trust that you would agree having used our service's on several occasions that, this indeed is not a common occurrence.
I was pleased to learn that you have now received your order. Furthermore, I have processed a full refund on to the credit card used when making your purchase.
I trust that these together with my renewed apologies, will go someway to restoring your confidence in lastminute.com.
I thank you for taking the time to inform me of problems you encountered, it's feedback such as this that lastminute.com can work on improving the level of service we provide our customer's and ensure that we are working with the best suppliers.
Yours Sincerely
Terri Stanghon – Customer Relations – Team Manager”
Aside from TerriÂ’s gratifyingly consistent misunderstanding of the purpose of the apostrophe (though she missed the one on supplierÂ’s), I think this is an almost faultless reply: accepting responsibility, whilst explaining why things went wrong. It is true that I have used this website a few times before and never had any such problems. YouÂ’ll notice they have conveniently ignored my request for an extra fifty pounds for my time, but you canÂ’t have everything.
I hope the email team donÂ’t get into trouble though, especially Hari Thukral, who I like to think I had struck up a personal friendship with, and who I am sure IÂ’d be meeting up for a drink with, if he didnÂ’t probably live thousands of miles away.
I like to think that any customer would get this response, regardless of whether they were discussing the issue in an open forum, but the clear lesson is that it pays to go straight to the top when things go wrong. I am impressed with the speed with which this was all finally cleared up. I have received much more shoddy treatment from pcservicecall, the computer fixing wing of PC World in the last couple of months and wrote to them a couple of weeks ago (maybe I will include that 4 page letter in a future warming up- it was another extraordinary bad example of customer service) and they still havenÂ’t responded to my letter. Not that I make a habit of complaining you understand. Only when I get royally dicked around.
So IÂ’ll leave it up to you to decide what you think of lastminute.com now. Obviously theyÂ’ve bought me, so you canÂ’t trust my opinion on them. I just hope Jon Thoday doesnÂ’t read this and realise that the generous gift I bought him ended up costing me nothing. Ha ha ha! Well not in monetary terms. The stress and continued appreciation of my non-existent patience has taken years off me.
