Yesterday I experienced two worlds of customer service within less than a couple of minutes. I had made an appointment with a local company to come and clean the carpet in mom’s old bedroom. I am going to turn it into my tea room where I have all stuff belonging to Harlequin Tea. It is almost growing out of its corner in my office. But since the carpet is quite dirty in there I decided to put the money and have it professionally cleaned. The appointment was scheduled between 12 and 2pm. So I made sure the room was completely empty and ready for them. And while waiting I was doing some other stuff. One of them was to order product bags. I am actually completely out of small bags so it was quite urgent. I put in my order for 100 bags at VistaPrint as I have ordered before and didn’t think about it more. Well after a couple of minutes I started to do the math of the difference between ordering 100 bags and 250 bags. Stupid that I haven’t done that before but yesterday was the day. And I realized that I am much better off ordering 250 bags. Crap and I had just put in the order. Well, I took the order number and I sent an email to VistaPrint asking if it was possible to change the order to 250 bags and asking how I would go ahead and pay the difference.

At this point it is getting closer to 2pm and time is running out for this carpet cleaner tech to show up. They had sent THREE confirmation notices on Thursday, one via Facebook, one via email and one text message and I didn’t have time to answer them directly since I was at work so they even obnoxiously again send a text message wanting me to confirm their confirmation… good grief people. But with all that you would think that they could communicate, right? And in all correspondence it said that the tech would call or text prior his arrival.
At 2:20pm I sent them a text and a PM on Facebook wondering where they were because no one had showed up or made contact. And I hear nothing from them.
BUT I got an email back from VistaPrint. It is now 15 minutes from I sent them my email and I get a response. Absolutely no problem to change my order from 100 to 250 bags, and on top of that, they have applied a coupon so there will be no extra charge for me! WOW!!! VistaPrint are amazing!!! That was very very kind of them and it will make such a huge difference for me! That is excellent customer service!

While I am super happy about VistaPrints excellent customer service I am also more and more frustrated realizing that the carpet will not be cleaned as I thought. I also now have boxes and stuff all over the house that I need to put back in the room again. Not to big of a task but still. I am going to rotate stuff that was in mom’s bedroom into the office and the tea stuff into the bedroom. Time is ticking and I made up my mind that if I had not heard anything at 3:30pm I would cancel the appointment. So at 3:35 I sent a text message, email and facebook message at the same time advising that since no one has as much as contacted me I am no longer interested in their services. To add to this, I had a couple of red flags already when I made the appointment. For example, the company said in their email that they follow New Zeeland and Australian standards. WTF? I live in Texas, what does NZ and Australia have to do with this? I did ask and it was because they have higher standards than US. I couldn’t care less about their standards, nor will I make any research about it. Clean my damn carpet and make it look good. Secondly, if you are writing an email and especially a business email, don’t you write your name and preferably contact information at the end of the email? It was absolutely nothing. They called themself “Cleaning Service” and except through the facebook messages I had absolutely no idea who I was talking to. I think that was the biggest red flag for me actually. It was just so unprofessionally written and I thought it was a scam. So when they didn’t show up, I took the opportunity to run out of that appointment. I had gotten other referrals as well and as soon as that email and text was written I contacted him and set up an appointment next week.
Though now it didn’t take long time before getting an answer… when I already had cancelled the appointment, that’s when someone answer me. Their tech had been in an accident and that’s why no one showed up. Okay… I am so sorry your tech has been in an accident. But… wasn’t there anyone that could have texted or contacted me in any form or fashion telling me that he would not show up? I would have understood that completely and rescheduled. Why didn’t someone answer my text at 2:20pm? And again, no name, I have no clue who the heck I am talking to! So impersonal and it all just looked like a scam.

As a small business owner myself, I put a lot of pride and effort into customer service. I will bend backwards to make customers happy! I want to be professional and have a good reputation. I want my customers to be happy for their product and look forward to come back and get more. So from a small business owners perspective… I understand that it may have been a very hard situation and things forgotten if this was a BAD accident. I work EMS, trust me I have seen them all. But wasn’t there someone that could respond at a text message sent over 1.5 hour ago and why didn’t anyone think about contacting the customer super quickly and say Shit happened, we won’t be there? My immediate response would be, lets talk on Monday and reschedule. They now lost a client instead…