The lifespan of a Special Order, CS Style

[Hon'ya-chan]

October 15: Customer orders book. We quote her 7-10 days for it to arrive.
October 22: Book comes in. We check it in, and call her. Nobody picks up, so we leave message. We hold for a week.
October 30: Call again. Warn customer she has an extra week to pick it up. Tag book for a week pull.
November 7: Book is thrown onto the return cart to be sent back to the warehouse. A day late, but who cares, right?
November 8: Guess who decides to come in? She claims she was called 4 days ago (Nov 4th) and wants to pick up her book. She gets mad when it takes 30 minutes to find said book after checking the paperwork, the computer, and searching for it.

So in essence, 2 weeks = 4 days for the customer. Why can't they call and tell us to save the book, I never know.

[PuckishOne]

Is that anything like dog years?

When I order a book, I am so right there as soon as they call me!

[BookstoreEscapee]

Wow, you call them twice? We called once, they had 2 weeks to come get it, or it went back (on the shelf or to the warehouse, depending on the book). People only got a second call if there was something unusual/special about the order.

[Hon'ya-chan]

Wow, you call them twice? We called once, they had 2 weeks to come get it, or it went back (on the shelf or to the warehouse, depending on the book). People only got a second call if there was something unusual/special about the order.

Call when the book comes in, call one week later. Surprisingly, most of them pick up the book within the first week.

[OhHerro]

we would call orders that were e-mailed one week after they arrived, just in case the notice was filtered into a spam folder. Otherwise it was 2 weeks. The only other time we'd give a second courtesy call would be if it was a large order or something that we couldn't return to the vendor.

I used to run the music department and I stopped returning them because so many would just show up after we had pulled them from the holds shelf.

[MrSunshineState]

Customers read?

[flybye023]

I feel your pain. When I worked in the back office of a large retailer, cashiers would often send up credit cards that a customer had left behind. Company policy was that we would only hold the card for 24 hours though we let that slide a little since it could be locked in a safe every night, plus, since we had to call the bank/card company and then manually destroy the cards, we needed a day where there wasn't much other work to be done.

So, we get a card and have it for about 3 days. A lady finally calls in asking about it, we confirm that it is here but she better come quickly because it is scheduled to be destroyed. She begs and pleads for an extra week and we grant it. About that time we got really super busy and didn't have time to destroy the cards we had. A month goes by and finally, I have time and go through all the cards (there were about 10) call the banks to report them lost, and destroy them.

The next freaking day! She comes into the store looking for it. I get the call via the service desk so most of my conversation was with my fellow employee. I tell him what happened, apologize and say the card has been cancelled and destroyed. I advise that the customer contact her bank. He relays this to the customer. We both hang up. Issue resolved.

Not. I get a call back about five minutes later because this poor guy has been dealing with her ranting and raving the whole time. She demands that I come out of the office to deal with this. I refuse a) because I'm safe in my little hidey-hole and don't have to deal with her face to face and b) because I had already given the only answer there was. It wasn't going to change. I agree to talk with her over the phone though and politely remind her of how she had agreed to one week only, how we actually gave her a month, and that she never called or came in--we hadn't heard from her since, and--I'm very sorry--but the card is no more. Issue finally resolved.

Not. Five more minutes later a manager comes into the office to find out what's going on and how dare we destroy this poor customer's credit card. I repeat previous story, show him the written log (thank-you Higher Power) that we kept showing when the card was received, when the call came and when the card was destroyed. Remind him of company policy and apologize for breaking it. End result: manager goes back up front to the customer and tells her her card has been destroyed per company policy and that she can just deal with it.

[crazylegs]

On the flip side, I have placed an order on a book over 10 months ago that I now know I am definately not going to get from that store, why? I hear you ask, it's closed down!