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I JUST can’t any more.
The last month and more has been wild for me and much of South Africa – I was running a workshop at Wits on September 20, so was witness to the very beginnings of the student protests; three days later I heard that the Syferbult community was without water and that set me off on weeks of bulldogging the municipality and anyone else I could corner; I’ve been researching dog-fighting in South Africa for a story; and all the while, the background noise is the steady trump, trump, trump of idiocy filling the speakers and muffling not just the good but the normal.
So this column is not going to take on the mini budget, the incredibly provocative ‘public order policing’ strategies of the police, the multiplication of extraordinary eyebrows in public life or any other headline issues. This is the column of Little Things. Specifically, totally rubbish customer service.
A month after the Pikitup truck crunched my car, slicing neatly into the metal underneath the brake light and turning the lights into fragments of plastic, I finally got the go-ahead to take it to the panelbeaters.
The timing was not so good; my husband is in one of his twice-yearly deadline frenzies, when you can’t even be sure he’s noticed your mouth moving, let alone heard anything you say. Borrowing his car is out of the question: anyone who comes between him and his ability to drop everything and run to an unexpected meeting has to anticipate serious consequences.
So when the head of my brand new vibrating toothbrush came off in my mouth, I was in a quandary. I had no plans to pay Uber a couple of hundred rand for a there-and-back trip to the shopping mall. So I phoned Aquafresh and spoke to complaints (or whatever it’s called). Oh dear, they said. Give us your address and we’ll arrange for someone to drop a replacement off.
It was fortunate that I found an old toothbrush, one that had not yet been used to scrub the grouting, because it was a full week later that I got a call from a driver.
“What is your address? I have to pick up a parcel from you.”
Surely not, I said. I know of no parcels I owe anyone. Where are you from?
From Colgate, was the reply. Light slowly dawned. “Ah! You mean Aquafresh!” (Perhaps a generic use of the name, like Hoover.) “You have something for me?”
“No, I must pick up the product that’s not working.”
“But surely you have a replacement?”
“No, no, that will come next week, maybe.”
I was giggling as I wrapped the broken toothbrush in a plastic bag. Tell me it’s not true! Tell me you aren’t going to send a driver all this way, from Bryanston to Roodepoort… twice? And if that is in some way necessary to your arcane processes, why not send the new toothbrush first (result: reasonably happy customer) instead of collecting the faulty one first (result: increasingly bad-tempered customer).
Ah well. I know I’m not doing the environment any favours with my toothbrush choices. I think I should start hunting down bamboo toothbrushes.
I bought a top to wear for that September workshop, from Edgars. I hardly ever go into Edgars, for reasons of historic pissed-offness: I was an account holder from 1987 till 2010, when I cut up my card in customer services because I was beyond tired of their awful service and poor quality product.
(I was, among other things, receiving statements for my own Edgars account only about once every four or five months, while getting, with clockwork regularity, monthly accounts and Special! Offers! for my father – who had died two years earlier. After I closed the account, I then got post every month for about a year reminding me that I had some R5 000 credit to spend…)
Back to my nice new top. Two washes later, it looked like a rag rescued from the cleaning cloths bucket. It had shrunk significantly lengthwise; the stiffening in the collar and lapels was fraying, and flapping out visibly when you put the thing on; the cuffs were as pap as slap chips soaked in too much vinegar.
So I took it back. Aah, but even though they still had the same tops for sale in the shop, Edgars could not give me a cash refund, because I had mislaid the receipt. Even though the poor quality was right in front of their noses, as was a rather annoyed customer.
Guys, you get it so, so wrong. You’re so busy applying policy and ticking off procedures and suspecting everyone of fraud and theft that you fail to take into account the impact on the customer. In both these cases, it is self-evident, undoubted, undeniable poor quality that has inconvenienced the customer; your procedures and inflexibility compound the offence.
So? I will use the gift card that I was forced to accept at Edgars, and never go back; I will seek an alternative toothbrush. And I’ll tell everyone about it, too. Clever moves, not.
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on Twitter.
