3 cheers for John Lewis; or maybe just two.

The best way to get the Xmas presents you want is to give them yourself. And I’d decided that I ‘needed’ a new laptop because my old one was old in laptop terms and its hard disk showed red when I clicked on ‘my computer’. Plus I thought I could pose better with an Ultrabook.

So I did the survey work and made my choice. I rejected Apple despite my enthusiastic use of an iPAD because I see the limitations of its ‘walled garden’. And I rejected the models with touchscreens because they’re heavier and I want to use my laptop for serious computing of the Excel/Word/Powerpoint variety. I decided on an ASUS and went on-line to John Lewis and ordered it.

Thursday before Xmas the delivery man rang to say that there was nobody in and that he was reluctant to leave it with a neighbour because he thought that there was a problem with one of my parcels (I’d also ordered my wife some fancy gadgetry for Xmas) but that he’d deliver next morning. Full marks so far.

Next morning the delivery was made and although the box for my wife was fine the other decidedly was not. Instead of a box it was a John Lewis carrier bag with a box inside and, although the ASUS is little more than 1 kg,it  was clearly not heavy enough to be a laptop box. When we opened the bag and the box all we got looked like an empty biscuit tin so I rejected the delivery. All well and good so far and plenty of time for John Lewis to find my laptop and to make the correct delivery.

Not so easy. On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday my wife and I spent several hours on the phone to the johnlewis.com call centre, most of the time was of course waiting for a reply. There was talk of escalating to this team and that and suggestions that I had signed for both parcels with the obvious implication that I had the laptop and was trying to avoid paying for it. At one stage I was asked to go to the police station and register a crime. In these four days all the good feelings which I’d had about John Lewis built up over years of shopping with its store in Cambridge and at Waitrose were slowly vanishing. I just could not reconcile the lack of empathy being shown by the call centre with the overwhelming competence and courtesy shown by John Lewis’ in store staff.

But then it changed. On the Sunday morning a lady from John Lewis customer service called. She acknowledged the problem, said she was working on it and told me she’d keep me informed. We agreed that I would go into the store in Cambridge and buy a replacement and then reverse my first payment if/when she’d found out what had happened.

After Xmas the lady rang me again to advise me that she’d made no progress yet but it was clear that she was beginning to put the delivery company under some pressure and on New Year’s Eve she rang me again and told me that she would be crediting my account. She even told me that John Lewis would be making an ex gratia payment to compensate me for the grief I went through before Xmas. I told her that was nice but her professionalism had been a more than adequate compensation. But I accepted the money nonetheless.

Why had this gone so horribly wrong before the lady stepped in? I can only suspect that John Lewis sub-contracts its call centre. And the operators there are focussed on simply processing transactions and not on maintaining relationships. Certainly the contrast between the call centre and the customer service lady was like night and day. Had it not been for the latter this blog would be very different. So two cheers for John Lewis, all for the above mentioned lady, and big fat raspberry for its call centre.

As a prequel to the above: I first ordered my computer using a credit card and the card company blocked the transaction. When I challenged it I was told that the transaction was ‘suspicious’ because it was an internet transaction. What planet is it on? Was I the only person buying on-line? I think not. Or was it that John Lewis was perceived as a money laundering organisation? I use my credit card frequently, both in the UK and internationally, and often on-line. What was going on? But could I get an explanation or an apology? No way.