Friday 29 June 2007

My follow up Red Rooter Complaint. Ouch!

To Clearly No One Cares,

I am writing you this complaint after a recent experience I had at your Alphington/Fairfield outlet. I need not go into the entire scenario again as a fellow dinner (or lack there of) has put his complaint forward also.

I’m a firm believer that without customer feedback you can never really know how you are positioned within the market. Let me tell you, right now after that woeful experience I would rate Red Rooster lower than a microwave dinner. At least at home I don’t have to put up with incompetent, blatantly annoying and clearly shocking customer service.

Why would one work in hospitality if they have no customer service?? You don’t see Pauline Hanson working in a Chinese take-away do you??? Seriously, just because you food is cheaper than a restaurant doesn’t mean you can cut corners with staff. The manager that I faced on that day was nothing short of inept.

I not one of those people who is hung up on body size, but one must look respectable. I put this to you that if you were to go to a dentist with crooked, yellow teeth, or a hairdresser with a wig, would you trust them? Simply put (at not at all trying to be harsh), the manager of your store was obese. Her clothes were dishevelled and dirty, and she was enormous.

Sadly if you are to continue down this path, you are going to end up being the next Pizza Hut. A forgotten, greasy taste on the back of people’s tongues, never to raise your pathetic heads again.

Red Rooster should be Red Faced!

This is the reply email from the useless Optus giant. UNSATISFACTORY!

Dear Mr Davidson

RE: Optus Telephone Account

Thank you for your letter dated 19/06/2007 regarding your Optus Telephone Account.

Firstly, I would like to apologise on behalf of Optus for any distress and inconvenience that you may have experienced in connection with this matter.

As per your enquiry, we tried to find out your account information, but unfortunately were not able to locate it. We would appreciate if you provide us the Account number for your internet connection or Pre-activation number of your home phone. Once we receive this information, we will be more that happy to help you in context to your queries.

Should you have any further queries or wish to discuss this matter further, please do not hesitate to contact Optus Customer Service on 1300300693.

Thanks & Regards

Dalip

Red Rooster Whinge

To whom it may concern,

On Saturday the 24th June at around 11.30am, myself and two friends decided we would pull in to you Alphington store drivethru. This was the beginning of terrible experience of epic proportions.

Upon entering the drivethru and ordering our meal, the girl was struggling from the onset. It seems she had great difficulty in putting together an order consisting of a quarter chicken and chips, a Flaava and a Portuguese chicken meal. Now, for someone who is “trained” to do this job, I wouldn’t have thought that would be too difficult a task. I was wrong. Once we managed to get over that little hurdle, we proceeded to sit there waiting for our meal for nearly fifteen minutes. Without being unfair, I do understand that a little waiting time may be required, but for a fast food outlet, that was absolutely RIDICULOUS!

Finally when our food had been fed, grown, plucked, cooked and served to us without even the slightest apology from your booth operator, we went on our way. About 3km down the road when I had gotten everything out of the bag, I realised that my order was incorrect. I found this most surprising really, considering the amount of time it took to order. You would think they would have had time to double and triple check it. Nevertheless, we proceeded to do a u-turn and head back to the store in a less than pleased manner, as you would imagine. Here is where the experience takes a nasty down slope.

As I approached the young lady who served us and presented her with our dilemma, anyone would have thought that I had just told her that her dog had died. The look of bewilderment on her face was second to none. Upon asking for our order to be rectified and having her stare blankly at us, the manager poked her head out from the back and most abruptly asked, or should I say stated, “What’s the problem?” After explaining what had occurred and not even the littlest skerrick of customer service, I was forced to ask where my Portuguese chicken was. The answer I received was nothing short of amazing. The manager’s reply, and I quote, “Its still cooking”. Firstly, I found that particularly hard to believe due to the fact it had been over 20 minutes by then and what I found even harder to swallow, was that fact I had ALREADY LEFT THE STORE!! If that was not shocking enough, your manager proceeded to turn around and say, in an excessively rude tone, and I quote once again, “Well, do you want it or not?”

After all of this, I thought it can’t possibly get any worse. I was wrong once again. All I wanted was the order I had asked for, so I posed the question of how long it would be. The reply I received left me flabbergasted. Your extremely bad mannered, un-customer service orientated manager told me it would be another 10 MINUTES!!! If she was intentionally trying to piss me off, she succeeded, with honours. I was left with no alternative but to ask for my money to be returned and promptly left the store, hungry and need I say, horrendously annoyed.

Since you have provided a forum for your customers to contact you about their experiences, I have clearly chosen to do so. I feel I have been subjected to a most harrowing experience at your store, one of which I should not have been presented with in the first place, and one that no other should have to go through. If this is the way you are going to conduct yourselves, regardless of my annoyance, it is clear to me that you will not survive for much longer. I would like to have said that the experience had left nothing but a bad taste in my mouth but unfortunately I did not get to put anything in there, due to the fact that it seemed impossible to actually get served any food in a REASONABLE amount of time and in a REASONABLE manner. In conclusion, Saturday the 24th of June was the last time I will have entered your Alphington store. To be totally honest, I would rather spend an afternoon, sticking needles in my eyes than be subjected to that kind of torture again. Never have I been on the end of such a displeasing set of circumstances when ordering fast food.

Some sort of a reply to this would be appreciated, if it’s not too much trouble.

Thursday 28 June 2007

The Bunnings complaint

This one is scathing……


I recently emailed you in this form about a particularly horrible experience I was subjected to upon visiting your Northland store. The service or " lack of service " your store provided was so excruciating that the person I was with made a complaint about the same issue due to them being even more displeased than myself, if that is even possible. The only thing that I found even remotely pleasing about this experience was that there was a forum where I could vent my frustrations with the hope that just maybe it would be worthwhile. This is obviously not the case. Having taken the time to provide some feedback, according to you, I was supposed to be contacted in relation to this matter within a couple of business days. As you would imagine this did not occur. It seems incompetence and excessively poor customer service is rife throughout your organisation. The slightest shred, if there was any, of Bunnings keeping me as a customer has now completely diminished. I feel nothing short of foolish to think that by taking the time to try and communicate with you, you would even show me the smallest amount of courtesy and reply. Lowest prices are just the beginning? You're not mistaken about that. It was the beginning of a most horrendous experience in customer service and total disregard for any professional courtesy, one that has done little more than left a bad taste in my mouth. If you feel it unnecessary to reply to this feedback this time, do not stress yourselves. Enlightened now by your conduct, I would rather contract chicken pox than deal with your company again in any way shape or form. At least that would be less irritating.

Complaint about a complaint to Connex

I think this is a cracker……



Over a week ago now I emailed you about a complaint that I felt was worthy of letting you know about. It was in regards to being squashed in like a sardine on your trains due to their being not enough carriages. I was particularly displeased at the time due to it making my trip to work nothing short of painful, to say the very least. The next day however, it was made apparent that you had problems with some of the train's brakes within the fleet. I understand that this may have had something to do with it but it was not the first time even so. Having taken that into account, I assumed that would give you a valid reason to reply to me with, for that particular instance anyway. This was not the case. Not only did you not reply with that, you have not replied at all! According to the automatic reply that was sent, you would be contacting me within 7 days. This kind of customer service is totally unacceptable. Obviously customer service does not seem to be a high priority in your organisation which is clearly reflected in the way you run your sub-standard rail service. I do not see the point in providing an avenue for customer feedback where you state that you will respond and do not. It not only wastes my time, it makes the entire exercise frivolous. Further more it really does accentuate how incompetent Connex really is and how little you care about your customers. If I can take the time to provide some feedback for you to take on board, surely you can at least humour me with some type of response at the very least. If not, I have a suggestion for you. Do not provide a platform for this to occur, or any other platform for that matter. It will make no difference because if you continue to run your organisation the way you are at present you will not be around for much longer anyway. Maybe then I will not be travelling on and trying to communicate with a totally incompetent and sub-standard rail company.

This is the 2nd Compliant I just sent to Optus. You'll get the drift.

Replying to a complaint should primarily be about solving the issue/s at hand and finding a solution that is equally beneficial to both parties, NOT call me up whilst I’m at work apologise for something you know nothing about and find no resolution to the problem, but proceed to inform me of facts I already am aware of. The words I would use for this type of response are: useless, ineffective, hopeless, pathetic, incompetent, inept and all round rubbish.

I didn’t leave feedback so one more person could get on the phone and tell me to tell my tale of woe again. I left the complaint to get a resolution. After speaking with the complaints person, his excuse for “a resolution” was to tell me that my phone line was not connected (that’s amazing... Because I told you that already, are you a psychic??), and that he would meet with the people I spoke with to convey my disgust (even though he had no idea of which call centre they worked in).

To my disgust Optus has failed to provide me with any real reason to use them at all. A simple complaint about a phone line and a rude staff member has materialised into nothing. What a shock. I’m sure Optus will pick up the ball eventually, when they realise that money isn’t everything, customers are or when hell freezes over, or world peace breaks out or when Osama Bin Laden becomes a Christian.

Grow up Optus, grow up.