We encounter quite a few interesting customers and deal with a wide variety of interesting issues on a day to day basis. Some of our experiences have been off the wall ridiculous and entertaining so we have chosen to document some of these situations in our blog.
Some of these stories take place when we didn’t have much experience with how to deal with customers. If you read carefully, you’ll notice some of our mistakes and hopefully not make the same ones!
If you have any funny customer service stories of your own, please submit them to us!
Customer Stories: But It’s In The Picture!
When you run an online only store, it is essential to have good product pictures. Because the customer can’t actually touch or interact with the product in person, your product photos are the single most important factor in whether the customer will make a purchase or not.
As a result, we often embellish our [...]
Customer Stories: All Online Stores Are Out To Get You
With the sheer number of telemarketer calls and spam emails that we all receive on a day to day basis, it’s no wonder that many of us are a bit paranoid about who we provide our information to. While most stores and shopkeepers run a legitimate and honest business, all it takes is one [...]
Customer Stories: Give Me Your Vendors
We get a ton of calls on a regular basis from customers seeking discount pricing for bulk purchases. In most cases, their definition of a “bulk” purchase and our definition of “bulk” are miles apart. For example, just the other day we had a customer who demanded a “bulk” discount for purchasing [...]
Customer Stories: I’m Lost And Can’t Find Your Store
It’s safe to say that a large percentage of our customers are not very tech saavy. But for some strange reason, I always expect a minimum level of computer competency whenever I speak with a customer on the phone.
For example, if a customer is able to find our store via the world wide web, [...]
Customer Stories: Discount On A Huge Order
I would say that probably 50% of the calls that we receive are from customers asking for discounts on products that they wish to purchase in bulk. We are not a wholeseller so we generally don’t offer price breaks unless the quantities involved are fairly large.
But what is definition of large? Apparently, the [...]
Customer Stories: The Shotgun Wedding
Even though I am born and raised in the United States, I still encounter certain phrases and figures of speech in the English language that I’ve never heard before. So when I had to call this customer in order to clarify his order, I was totally caught off guard by what he had to [...]
Customer Stories: The Woman Who Didn’t Get A Receipt
I’m not sure why but our online store attracts a large quantity of customers that are not very web or email savvy. We spend a lot of our time taking orders over the phone because people don’t feel comfortable ordering online or entering their credit card information on a computer.
While a good portion of [...]
Customer Stories: Storing Credit Card Numbers
We take our privacy policy very seriously with our online store. Due to liability reasons, we make an active effort to not store any payment information or credit card numbers in our database. This way, if our website ever gets hacked, the hacker will only be able to obtain a few names and [...]
Customer Stories: The Customer That Was Too Nice
It’s always refreshing to have a nice, considerate customer every now and then. I really enjoy speaking to our customers when they are polite on the phone, even if they are just calling to complain about something. 90% of the time, if they state their case clearly and politely, I’ll try and help [...]
Customer Stories: The English Major Who Couldn’t Read
The one downside of running an online store or business is that inevitably you’ll encounter a customer who is extremely abrasive and condescending. This particular lady placed an order with us, misread the description and then accused us of misleading her into making a purchase.
Customer: Yes, I’m calling because my order was not delivered [...]
Customer Stories – Should I Go Through With the Marriage?
I don’t know why, but for some reason, our customers always want to tell me their life story when they make a purchase over the phone. They nonchalantly ask me about the merchandise and then slowly steer the conversation towards what’s going on in their life. In some extreme cases, they ask me [...]
Customer Stories – The Customer Who Didn’t Care
We get a lot of customers who purchase our linens on behalf of a large organization or for a specific event. This particular customer managed a local charity that supports children born with a certain disease (I’m keeping the specific charity anonymous for privacy reasons). She was looking for personalized handkerchiefs to congratulate [...]
Customer Stories – Blind Leading the Blind
Sometimes there are products that we carry that I’m not intimately familiar with. Because buying and stocking items for our online store is primarily my wife’s responsibility, she has much more knowledge about our products than I do. Fortunately, I don’t have to take that many customer support calls so my weaknesses are [...]
Customer Stories – Cheap Anniversary Gift Return
With every store, you’ll inevitably attract a certain class of customers that will only shop in your bargain bin. These people will skip all of your nicer merchandise and go straight for the cheapest stuff that you carry in your store. Often times, these people will also ask for a further [...]
Customer Stories – Wedding Day Disaster
This particular customer from the east coast purchased some wedding handkerchiefs from our online store about 10 days in advance and had them delivered directly to her wedding venue. The one mistake she made however was that she addressed the package to her maid of honor instead of either herself or the wedding planner. [...]
Customer Stories – Exploiting Chinese Labor
Every now and then, we get a customer that drives us totally insane. While it isn’t fun to deal with these customers, working with these difficult people make for great stories to tell our friends. This particular customer that I’m writing about was a very headstrong lady that gave us a really hard [...]
