Customer Service - IKEA
A decade ago I swore that I would never buy another piece of IKEA furniture. I don't remember the precise details but it had something to do with a missing part or, maybe, a broken part, and having to wait at the returns and customer service desk at the Montreal IKEA store. Arrgh. Frustrating.
When we moved into this house last autumn we had a lack of furniture and window furnishings. So we decided to hit IKEA again. Those first few months improved my impression of the company. The quality seemed to be improved and for the price it was good value. Well the good run started changing course around Christmas and, today, it reversed completely.
We have waited for the last two and a half months for the Edland dressing table to be in stock. Finally last week it appeared in the Toronto and Ottawa stores and we thought that it would finally appear in Montreal this week. No such luck. So we decided to drive the one hour and forty-five minutes to the Ottawa store today.
Yes we did drive to Ottawa for a desk. We really wanted this freaking dressing table....get it? My daughter had been patiently waiting for it since Christmas and I had decided, a few days back, that she had waited long enough and that, today, she would have a nice surprise when she got back from school - a built, Edland dressing table in her room, to complement the other Edland pieces she had.
We got there at 9:55am. The first sign that things had not changed at IKEA greeted us the second we walked into the store. To the right of the front doors the returns and customer service desk was already open...with a line up. There were far less people, on the left, waiting for the actual store to open. The odd thing about the Ottawa store is that you need to drive to another location, a few blocks away, to pick up the furniture you have bought at the main store. I find that a bizarre service model. Thanks for spending hundreds....now drive over to our warehouse and you can pick it up. Regardless it went well and we were out of Ottawa within thirty minutes and driving back home.
Well....four steps into the building of the desk we hit a wall. Whomever packed this particular box had made an error. I don't know what the doohickey is called but there were two right hand ones instead of one left and one right. Ooooooppppss. Well...there went my day. I was pissed.
Luckily I needed to go pick up my children at school and my parents at the airport. This meant that my wife ended up on the phone with the customer service people. How long was the wait? Forty-five minutes. Yep. Forty-five minutes. She had the option to hang up and have them call back but that would have taken five to seven days! I would have blown a gasket.
At the airport I received a text message with the result of this hour long ordeal...a promised shipment of the correct part from the Ottawa store in a mere one to two weeks. Yep...Ottawa to Montreal in up to two weeks. Back in the days of voyageurs when paddling along the Ottawa River was the main route between the two cities it took a few days to make the trip. Today a cyclist could do it in a (long) day. In the age of overnight delivery what are they thinking??? They actually had the gall to ask my wife whether we were planning to visit Ottawa any time soon! Heck no....ship it!
I sometimes wish I had not spent fourteen years in customer service. It has made me a person that is very intolerant of incompetence and poor service. Of uneducated and unempowered customer facing employees. Asking one your customers to wait forty-five minutes because of one of your errors, of having to wait a week for a call back, is unacceptable service.
Whomever is running customer service for IKEA in Canada had better rethink their service. They need targets to reduce calls coming in, to reduce wait times, and to diminish resolution times. They need to take every problem that comes in and follow it to the root cause....to the plant and employee that packed that Edland box. There needs to be a commitment to improved service. A separation of duty between service and retail needs to happen. The line up at the service desk at 9:55 am and the forty-five minute hold time on their service line should be two fairly significant hints to the Director, VP, senior manager or whatever of IKEA Service that there is some serious fixin' required.
I am done with IKEA - well in two weeks anyway.
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