Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.
Rita Mae Brown (not Albert Einstein!) — “Sudden Death”
Another three weeks (two weeks beyond a suggested date to see a written response to the latest hours long phone call to Lowe’s!) and I’ve yet to see anything in the post, nor EMAIL, and not even an attempt at a phone call.
So I find a new number to try…866-284-8989 which is supposedly their “Executive Customer Relations” team line which is theoretically manned 0800-1900 from Monday to Friday.
Six calls at various times this morning and every time you get dumped to a voicemail box so I guess they’re using that to assign callers to an agent before they give you the magic ten-digit code that will supposedly connect you to them.
Weak doesn’t even begin to describe that arrangement.
If you’re going to bill yourself as an escalated customer service line, then you really owe it to the people who are calling you out of sheer desperation and frustration dealing with the impenetrable bureaucracy protecting Lowe’s from actual accountability to staff the line with humans that pick up the phone without having a voicemail as if it actually is a function you take seriously.
It’s already giving me the vibes of the “Appeasement Team” who after several weeks have even come close to actually doing anything useful in spite of promises to the contrary, much less “appeasing” me and resolving our dispute. It’s the appearance of activity prevailing over actual achievement.
I may actually leave my details later but seeing that this seems to be a dead end this morning, I figured I’d give Ms Kayla at the Knightdale store a ring to see if we can actually try to get this situation sorted in spite of the “Appeasement Team” and their clear indifference.
It’s never a good sign when the line is immediately picked up and then dumped on hold in about a second or two without a single word spoken. It’s even more dispiriting for the customer when the phone is ringing way too many times before someone deigns to pick up.
And who might that be? A gent in the receiving department who can’t get any of the managers on duty to pick up the phone until he actually goes out on the floor and hunts down an assistant manager named Scott as Ms Kayla is apparently not in the store today.
I get it that everyone’s probably busy and that answering the phones is likely a very low priority but when my alternative is driving several miles out of my way and potentially getting no resolution, sometimes we must resort to Alexander Graham Bell’s invention.
Scott finally comes on the blower at the 11 minute 30 seconds mark and I give him a very basic timeline and the apparent ghosting over the past several weeks.
His considered plan of action is to go research the notes (fair enough as this is his first encounter with this situation with the caveat that the record maintained by Lowe’s is woefully incomplete and occasionally self-serving to deflect accountability and has little to none of my side of the dispute in it) and speak with Ms Kayla (also fair enough) and also reach out to the “Appeasement Team” before ringing me back later today.
It’s that last one that I think is problematic and pretty much doomed to failure.
It’d be one thing if I hadn’t experienced what passes for “customer service” at their hands for the past few weeks including one truly dreadful member of that department and the complete lack of any meaningful progress in resolving the situation.
Those people were the ones Ms Kayla were forced to “partner” with when her initial offer was insufficient.
The fact that they came back with the same number two days later after management was supposedly consulting (but curiously enough, Joe admitted that they only had the first installer’s notes to base their decision upon which obviously isn’t the full context they’d need!) and were very insistent that it was their final word strongly suggests they’re not going to be any more helpful now than they have been.
So pardon me for not really being on board with ever wanting to deal with those people ever again, especially given how rude and condescending Joe was in my last contact with that department over five weeks ago!
It seems like a complete waste of Scott’s time and mine to deal once again with a department I have already been given ample reasons to distrust their words and their lack of action and follow-through.
But Scott seems to be of a mind that once they have their claws on a case, we have to keep working through them and that this process of “research” is what he does whenever confronted with a situation such as this.
It didn’t seem to make one bit of difference that if the customer has already dealt with them and found them to be unpleasant and useless and has zero confidence in their ability to tell the truth or keep promises made, he’s going to still follow that process even though common sense would suggest that it will almost certainly fail to resolve the situation.
And that’s why that customary definition of lunacy is the title of this post.
At this point, Scott makes it abundantly clear that he’s got some customers in front of him that he feels are a higher priority and honestly I can certainly understand preferring to deal with people who are actually physically present in the store rather than a very unpleasant mess he had no hand in creating.
I couldn’t help but feel like I was being blown off and that my concerns about the “Appeasement Team” and experiences with them to this point were being completely ignored. He can try to spin that otherwise (and he actually did more than a few times toward the end of the conversation) but I don’t feel any closer to resolution than I did when I started this frustrating journey this morning and I don’t have any confidence I will be any time soon.
What I do know is that at the 27 minute mark, I apologised to Scott for apparently wasting his time and hang up in abject frustration.
I have no idea if he will actually follow up with his “research” and at this point I don’t know that I actually care.
I don’t feel that Lowe’s is of the mind that we need to come to a timely and reasonable resolution of our dispute and that was something I predicted right at the start when the supervisor in the off-shore call centre refused to negotiate compensation until after the installation was completed.
Once that happened, Lowe’s really has had no incentive to negotiate in good faith and so far the bureaucracy protected by call centre queues seems to be devilishly effective at stonewalling any attempt at holding them truly to account.
Maybe Scott will actually exceed my expectations of Lowe’s finally doing the right thing which right now are about as low as can be. One can dare to dream but I find his process to be dubious at best and chances of success about nil. 🙁