Customer service par excellence

A change in marital status has a way of throwing new things your way. First, you may have to deal with change of name, which usually leaves you wondering why you have to give up your maiden name for someone else’s. Men don’t have to do that at all, and some French women still answer their maiden names long after they get married. That notwithstanding, the name just has to change in our own part of the world.


Next is change of residence. As a sign that a woman has been duly sent off, she has to move to her new home! It could be real fun doing this, you know - when you have to decide, for instance, the colours that will grace the walls of your living room and bedroom, the kind of drape that meets your taste and the fabric you want your settee made of. Getting the kitchen fully equipped is in a class of its own.


Yes, that reminds me of an experience I had late last year with a new set of kitchen utensils I bought at Shoprite. I’m a lover of well-designed cooking ware with glass lids and the Kinox brand and one other brand whose name I can’t remember very well now. One of those November evenings, I was at The Palms shopping mall to buy some stuff for the month, and while looking through the racks at Shoprite, I could not find my choice brand; hence, I opted for a Tower set of cooking pots - three pots and a medium-sized frying pan. Tower is a quality brand and I had no idea I needed to consider its durability, so I paid for it.


I liked the burnt orange colour of the pots and of course, the glass lids, so I dashed home, cleaned one of them and cooked the evening meal in it. But to my greatest surprise, by the following morning the coating in the pot was already peeling off, forming tiny lumps that were already mixing up with the content in it. I was sad and angry. “I paid nearly N10, 000 for a set of non-stick pot, only for the coating to go bad the day after?” I said to myself.


Immediately, I removed the content, washed the pot and returned it to the point of purchase. Luckily, the lady at the Customer Care Unit was patient enough to listen to my complaint. I was surprised that Shoprite could boast of such staff since many of them were very rude in the past. “Hold on, madam, while I call the trainee manager for you,” she said. In less than two minutes, the man was with me. I lodged my complaint which he promised to look into, asking that I should give him my cell phone number so he could easily get back to me.


To make a long story short, he did get back to me and I got a refund. The fact that I could get that for the bad product I bought was surprising in a country where goods sold cannot be returned in most cases.


Most stores do not build a good rapport with the clients they service. They rarely demonstrate courteous interactions with customers during and after sales, but the new Shoprite seems to have charted a new and much better course as far as customer service is concerned!