Adrianne and I dealt with customer service departments of 3 companies today; she dealt with QuickBooks, whereas I dealt with HP and Staples. QuickBooks had great customer service and despite it taking 2 hours, Adrianne’s issues were resolved. On the other hand, my experience was 50/50. HP was helpful, Staples was unequivocally not. Which is why I am writing today instead of her. Without getting into the gory details (and getting me irritated more than I already am) we were having issues with our HP printer. We got it a little less than a year ago (this fact is key to part of my frustration). The first thing I did was to call HP and I was on the phone with the service guy for about an hour. After going through countless re-starts, calibrations, alignments, etc he apologized and let me know that he had gone as far as he could. He asked if I had purchased an extended warranty from wherever I had purchased the printer. Now, when we purchased this printer we had bought the extended warranty for one reason – 24/7 services and on site service – so I said yes and decided to call Staples Customer Service (where we bought it).
Here’s where the day got bad. I called Staples and gave them the warranty information. The response? “Sorry, we can’t help you; your warranty with us doesn’t kick in until your warranty ends with HP”. Mind you, the warranty we purchased from Staples is called “Day-of-Purchase Coverage”. Correct me if I’m crazy…but that sounds like to me that we have coverage from the day of purchase! Oho…apparently not. Even though front of the brochure talks all about the service (with the day-of-purchase coverage mentioned more than once), on the back (in the fine print), there is a contingency that it isn’t valid until after the other warranty wears out!!! So to clarify – it is called ‘Day of purchase coverage”, the entire brochure talks about all the service you receive the minute you purchase the product (without a single*asterisk that mentions contingencies anywhere in the front – but I don’t get any service from staples until a full year after I purchase my product? This was bad enough, but rather than apologize and suggest any way that we might be able to work things out she repeatedly quoted the terms and conditions claiming ‘there is nothing I can do’.
Let me tell you – there is ALWAYS something you can do, and the minute you forget that (even a big ol’ company like Staples) the minute you begin to lose business.
I hope someone from Staples reads this.
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