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| Spencer's Retail - A Customer Story! |
A few days back, we went to the Spencer's store where we shop regularly for some of our monthly groceries. It was renovated sometime back and it was looking far more spacious, organised and comfortable while browsing the products. New sections were also introduced like Diary & Bakery, Meat & Fish and Wine Shop - rather convenient for customers. They were even arranged appropriately so that it does not offend the sensitivities of certain customers - the design was quite thoughtful. The store belongs to the RP Goenka Group since 1989 and has a history dating back to 1863 when it was originally co-founded by John William Spencer and Charles Durrant.
Anyway, on one of our visits, we did not have the best of experiences. We had purchased groceries and ice creams for our family. When we went to the billing section, we noticed that around 50% of the counters were closed. It was not even lean hours or a lean day and there were good number of customers queueing up. Strangely, the counter operators were still there milling around the closed counters chatting with their colleagues but the counters were bolted so that customers could not stand-in for billing. Normally, some waiting at available counters would not have mattered so much to us but this time we were carrying ice cream. The store was not air-conditioned at that point of time and if we did need to wait good enough time, then we ran the risk of the ice creams melting and not maintaining its consistency, given it would also take some more time to get home before we put it in the refrigerator.
So we did the next best thing possible. We approached one of the operators at the closed counter and asked them to bill for us as we were carrying ice cream. While the operator was polite, yet he did not offer any help and instead asked us to approach one of the open counters. After that, he went back to chatting with his colleague. We waited a bit in the hope he would take notice and offer help but no luck on that. Left with no other option, we queued up and finally got the groceries billed. By the time we went back home and put it in the freezer, the ice creams had melted like we feared. In hindsight, perhaps we should not have bought ice creams at that juncture given the circumstances. We were quite disappointed and were wondering what to do. It then struck us that Spencers now has online e-shopping portal too. We googled and gave feedback on their website. That at least made us feel better.
To be honest, we were not expecting any further outcome, especially a positive outcome from the feedback we provided. We have seen most of the time that companies take the feedback in their stride, call up the customer (if they do at all) and apologise to them - that is about it! However, knowing that we at least did not let the matter rest and gave feedback to Spencers made us feel good. What followed next surprised us. We received a telephonic call from their Central Team profusely apologising and patiently hearing our perspective. Then the local Spencers store Manager called us, apologised and took our address details. When we asked the reason, he said he wanted to meet us personally and discuss our experience to avoid future recurrences. We thought that was very proactive though belated.
He visited at the agreed time, listened to us and promised to take action. This was interesting since we never pictured Spencers as a store that would take customer feedback seriously. Probably, misconceptions in our mind - most of the time, we associate such actions to high visibility companies and multinationals. We of course forget that even those usually do not bother about customer experience. Examples are Samsung and HTC. Anyway, this was turning out to be a pleasant experience after all. At least, the poor impression we received earlier was being replaced by the responsive attitude we saw in their teams.
And then came the Coup d'état or master stroke. Spencers handed over to us a complimentary hamper containing the ice creams that we had earlier purchased to make up for our experience. While this was not much, yet it went a long way in making the point that they took customer feedback rather seriously. This does not happen often with companies. Kudos to Spencer!
https://www.mouthshut.com/UrbanHermits/reviews
Wow! Good to see a company taking customer service seriously. I hope your experiences improved afterwards too. Thanks for sharing.
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