Thursday, January 31, 2008

Wenatchee Business Review Blog's - You can't always get what you want.

I have lived in the Wenatchee area for over seventeen years (yikes!) and the only constant in this area is how horrible the customer service is in local businesses. I'll be posting my consumer adventures in this area for the next couple of months, naming businesses and names about who gives the absolute worst service.

Office Depot
I'll start out with the worst experience as a customer that I have ever had in the last year or so. At around noon on a Wednesday, I went into to Office Depot to drop off some copying needs that I wanted done, it was a large order at 50 copies of two fifty sheet files, the assistant manager told me that I could come back in three hours, I said alright and left the place. At around four and half hour later, I came back into the store. There was one cashier for about seven to eight customers, not what I would call a great ratio. I went to the copying desk and futilely tried to get some customer service for about ten minutes, at that point I sent off my helper monkey to get some help from the local salesmen. I had two different salesmen tell me that it wasn't their business and they couldn't and wouldn't help me. They told me that the only person who could help me was in the middle of sale, which if it had been a few minutes I could have understood but I waited twenty five more minutes for a total of forty five minutes wasted there. I haven' been back since and I don't intend to ever go back until they hire at least two cashiers. Come on Office Depot, I know that you have it in you to hire another useless salesman, just apply that skill to getting an additional cashier. You can double the rate at which you anger your customers!!!

I created a scale of customer experience/service that I'm going to give to the various businesses in this area. The scale is from zero which is only for extremely poor customer service to five which is for customer service that doesn't make me want to bang my head against the wall hard enough to bleed out of my ears. It's not going to be used very much from what I've seen.

The First Score!
Office Depot
: 0/5, your speed and grace under pressure has set the bar for a new low in the Wenatchee Valley, keep up the lack of work, other businesses need some kind of warning sign to avoid failure.