First off, only my humblest respect is meant to Simon & Garfunkel for the title of this entry. However, it is quite fitting.
The latest installment features another customer interaction that I learned about during my stint in appliances the other day. This was just too good to pass up. Do you want to feel better about your life? Well, then read on!
A customer had recently purchased a refrigerator from our store. This refrigerator was a floor display that was sold to him at some dirt-cheap price – nearly a thousand dollars off of the original price. The customer called the department later that day saying he wanted to cancel the refrigerator because he was reading reviews that it was a bit loud.
Okay, I get that. If you live in a small home and noise is an issue, you don’t want it sounding like a freight train coming through, right? But there are a few directions you can go with this scenario.
1. There is a high chance that it was plugged in when he purchased it. It was a demo unit. Did he hear noise in the store?
2. Why cancel it before you even got it into the home? If you saved over a thousand dollars for a great refrigerator, wouldn’t you want to try to at least see if it sounds fine? Even if it is loud, you can still either return the item with no restocking fee or you could ask yourself, “Is this noise not worth the hundreds of dollars I saved?”
Whoever took the call was able to talk the guy out of it (mainly because they told the guy that they’d be able to sell a great fridge at dirt-cheap to a less picky customer on that same day.) but that wasn’t the end of it.
The guy called the next day and told the supervisor that he wanted to come into the store and listen to the refrigerator for two hours to see how it runs. He wanted us to get the refrigerator that somebody had already wrapped up and placed off the floor, bring it back onto the floor, unwrap it, and then plug it in just so he could sit around and listen to it.
I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell wish I could have two hours to kill just sitting around some electronics store doing nothing else other than listening to how a refrigerator sounds. Even when I’m home, I have things to keep me busy. I have to give it up to the guy. He did find the one thing that sounds more boring than actually selling appliances: listening to them run.
According to the appliance team, the guy came in just the other day, listened to it for less than a half hour, talked with the appliance crew about all the customer reviews he read online (UGH! That’s a whole other blog post alone. Wait have I already done one of those? Shit. See, this is what happens when you don’t update regularly.), and ended up canceling it anyway. I went up to the refrigerator that he was sold, stood around the item with another coworker for several minutes, and didn’t hear a damn thing. I just heard the sounds of his parents weeping at the wasted time their son wasted in our store.
More soon from the frontline...
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