Difference between caring/uncaring sales staff.

[TheGx]

I bought a maxwest phone on black friday at London Drugs with my friend who I helped set up his new Public account, and it turned out all the maxwest phones were defective and couldn't detect any sim cards we put in it - we tried koodoo and Public, the sales staff had a koodoo phone and I of course had Public.

We didn't know the phone was defective until after weekend when the Public moderators kindly informed us that the sim was set up and working fine, so it must be the phone being the problem and told us to put my friend new Public sim into another phone to see if it worked - and of course the Public moderator was right.

So on Monday I went back to London Drugs to help my friend exchange his maxwest phone for any working one so he could use his new Public sim card, but there weren't any phones left of the type we bought and so had to go to another London Drugs location at westhills. When I got there to exchange the phone for another maxwest one, luckily I decided to test it by putting in the new Public sim instead of just leaving with the new exchange - and of course after trying all 3 of the new maxwest phones there which were nitro4x and ssr, they all didn't detect any sim card.

At this point I told the sales person there that I though London Drugs should do more than refund our money in this situation, especially since all black friday sales were long over now and we had to spend the weekend confused about why the maxwest phone wouldn't work and then spent weekend getting the Public Moderators to look into this problem which ended up not even a Public Mobile problem to begin with.

The westhills staff told me to talk to their store manager the next day, and when I did the assistant store manager clearly didn't care to explore any other solutions to help me exept refund our money - this was even after his electronics manager confirmed that he knew that maxwest phone needed a software update and even after updating the software the defect was not solved. Needless to say this unsympathetic/uncaring attitude made us feel unvalued especially when they don't even care to keep our business and just want us and our problems out of their store.

So, instead of doing want they wanted which was just leave with our money, we took the phone to the Heritage location where the staff cared enough to look into reasonable solutions to our problem - the assistant store managers there and the electronics managers and even the bottom sales staff all gave us the feeling that they actually cared to help us fix this issue.

They even explained how we could escalate our complaint to the London Drugs head office if we wanted to and gave us feedback forms, and in the end they found us a more expensive phone that they could mark down to the same price as the defective maxwell one, which I think is very reasonble because they explored all options that were possible, instead of doing nothing like the westhills store did.

At Heritage they understood that all we wanted was to get a phone working at the same sale price we had originally paid so we could get my friend new Public number working, it wasn't about getting a better deal than we originally got or about making London Drugs pay for their mistake, it was about treating their customers fairly - which fairly speaking was to get us a working phone for the same price.

Anyways, to end I just want to say that the nice staff at Heritage London Drugs were caring and sympathetic similar to all my experiences with Public Moderators, so I always tell others of my good experiences with Public and other companies too.

[TheGx]

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@hss wrote:

I used to work in the Freedom store long time ago when it was called Wind. I had similar issues of phones not accepting sim as Freedom used different band than other carriers. We would just tell the customer to get a new phone or bring a new one as per the instructions provided to us. I have also worked in the call centre of one of the big three. And I have seen many cases where finding a solution is not easy due to company policies and instructions. There are not many out of pocket options from the sales guys but the Manager is bit more flexible.
Customer service is tough and not everybody can do it. It looks easy but is hard to please everybody when you are just a puppet working on the company instructions.
After having worked in the service industry for so many years, I learned that it is better to stay calm and patient. The Reps can't solve anything out of the box and there is no need to waste the time on them. Ask for a manager if required and the managers don't like arguing with customers so you might just get what you want or somewhere close to that.( if the problem cannot be fixed).
Hope you get it all solved in the end.👍

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Thank you, to be clear this issue was solved by the staff at Heritage London Drugs, they exchanged the defective phone for a better brand of phone that worked better and had more features too - which was way more than the assistant store manager and westhills did.

[dboxtvinfo715]

wow

[hss · Accepted solution]

I used to work in the Freedom store long time ago when it was called Wind. I had similar issues of phones not accepting sim as Freedom used different band than other carriers. We would just tell the customer to get a new phone or bring a new one as per the instructions provided to us. I have also worked in the call centre of one of the big three. And I have seen many cases where finding a solution is not easy due to company policies and instructions. There are not many out of pocket options from the sales guys but the Manager is bit more flexible.
Customer service is tough and not everybody can do it. It looks easy but is hard to please everybody when you are just a puppet working on the company instructions.
After having worked in the service industry for so many years, I learned that it is better to stay calm and patient. The Reps can't solve anything out of the box and there is no need to waste the time on them. Ask for a manager if required and the managers don't like arguing with customers so you might just get what you want or somewhere close to that.( if the problem cannot be fixed).
Hope you get it all solved in the end.👍