Last Friday, I was pissed. I waited around all day for a bedroom set from Levitz via Furniture.com that never arrived.
So I blogged about it.
But I didn't just blog about it. I went to LinkedIn and found the guy at Levitz all the way up the chain of command that this delivery screwup led up to... the Senior Vice President of Logistics. I called him out:
"You know who the buck stops with? Ward Dingmann, SVP of Logistics at
Levitz. If you leave your image to the guy at the warehouse, forget
your company. So, maybe Ward will Google himself or someone who know
him. He's on LinkedIn, but I'm not connected to him. So, if anyone
knows Ward, let him know there's a pissed off blogger who is without a
bedroom set."
Then... I got a comment, for someone at Levitz corporate:
"I
read your blog about the problems encountered with your delivery. If
you will provide me the delivery document number, your e-mail address,
or the phone number you used when you placed the order, I will get the
information to Ward so he can personally look into the situation."
Then, at 5:08PM on Tuesday, I hit the jackpot. One business day later:
Mr. O’Donnell
I wanted to personally apologize for the problems with your recent delivery attempt. Definitely appreciate any feedback (good or bad), and always attempt to improve our service.
While it is certainly no excuse in your case, we are in over 3,000 homes nationwide each day and try to perform all deliveries timely and to the satisfaction of our customers. I’m sorry that it did not happen in this case.
I can assure you we have already looked into the specifics of your delivery, and identified what might have happened. I have asked our VP of East Coast Warehousing to call you (on Wednesday) once he has all of the facts around what happened, and more importantly, can make a commitment on our attempt to correct and re-deliver.
In the meantime, please to do hesitate to call me directly with any other concerns or comments. Thanks again for your patience, and we hope you give us an opportunity do earn your trust again.
Sincerely,
Ward
And, like clockwork, Mr. Housein, head of East Coast Warehousing, called me up first thing Wednesday morning. He was apologetic and didn't pull any punches... saying they "screwed up" and explained to me in detail, exactly what happened. Basically, the stuff got barcoded or scanned wrong, and the person who did it didn't doublecheck when it got mixed up and came up cancelled. That's why there was no follow through, no notification... b/c someone just took a "cancelled" scan and accepted it without doublechecking and following through.
They do 1200 orders a day out of that place. It happens. One slipped through and it happened to be mine. So when we rescheduled for Saturday and I asked if he could get it to me earlier rather than later, he said, "We'll get it to you first... we've got to do this one right."
PLUS, I have a later order pending that's supposed to come the first week of October... a couch. He said that he was getting a shipment in on Friday, and if the couch came in, he'd put it on the truck and get me my couch (a month ahead of schedule) and the bedroom set at the same time. He even gave me his cell number in case I needed to get in touch with him!
When I asked him about the time that I lost in waiting around and what they were going to do about that, he said he was going to talk with customer service and "do the right thing to make you happy."
So there it is. After blogging about it on Friday, I get a response the next business day and I hear exactly what the plan to solve the problem is the day after. I got a total admission of failure by high level people in the company and full transparency into what happened.
So today was the rescheduled delivery. 8:30AM, the doorbell rings and the furniture is here--both my bedroom set and my couch. The delivery guys were courtious and quick. On top of that, after they left, I got a phonecall from the warehouse doublechecking to make sure my stuff arrived.
I have to say, I'm pretty wowed by this whole chain of events and the level of personal care taken by executive level people in the company to make good on a warehouse mixup. Basically, the won a lost customer back, and hopefully even got a few new ones because of this post. You should really check out their stuff at furniture.com. It was reasonably priced and it really looks beautiful now that its here, one week late for the bedroom set and over three weeks early for the couch. In the end a good result made possible by some very dedicated Levitz employees. Nice job Ward and Housein!
