They Made.com Me Angry

You might have seen me ranting about this like a mad woman today if you follow me on my personal Facebook or Twitter accounts. Or you might have seen Ben also retweet-ranting like a social media affected mental patient,  because that's what we do. We take down the bad guys one tweet at a time. Because we are THAT GOOD (and cool). You heard.

If you dodged that bullet then it's about to hit you right in the face now anyway. Sorry.

This isn't a post about home improvement so much as about how important customer service is to the (stressed and poor) home improver.

Way back in November I posted about how we'd bought a sofa from a website called made.com. Back then I was a happy, carefree, naive girl about town who loved the idea of saving some money by purchasing an expensive item via a website who make lovely things cheap by making their products to customer demand. They have some wonderful customer testimonials on their site, their Facebook page is full of praise and links to new and beautiful furniture and they assure you on their website:

So we ordered the bloody sofa and were told that we had an estimated delivery date of the 21st of February. Fine, no probs, we new it would take a while as like they say on their site, items are made to customer demand. Come the end of January I checked the delivery date again. Still estimated. I tried to click through to the so called Real Time Tracking System they have in place for 'every step of the way', and it just took me back to their website. Ok, again no probs, I'll just ask them when they are able to confirm the delivery date so I know when this sofa is going to be: in my house for sure/ I can make sure I work from home/ we can move the current sofa we have. 

So I took to their fairly active Twitter account and asked them. (*As note here I just want to add that made.com don't have a phone number).

"@madedotcom Hi! I have an estimated delivery date for my sofa, I was wondering when this will be confirmed? It's currently estimated for the 21st Feb, so will I hear closer to the time? Thanks."

"@anahavana Please email contact@made.com, thank you"

Ok, well that's a bit annoying as surely at least try to answer my query, but whatever, I'll email you. 

So I emailed the same question, both from my email account and via their online contact form. I waited. I waited until closing time (5pm) and nothing. So I waited again this morning, surely they would be checking their customer emails first thing and drop me a quick like just to reassure me that they are looking in to it? Nada. 

Then I got pissed off. 

I know that email and social channels have made us all (or maybe just me) more impatient with response times and I know that I am guilty of being frustrated when people don't get back to me straight away via email. But this is a business! They have £900 of my money! They should check their fucking emails! Not only that but I could see that they'd been active on their Twitter and Facebook channels, so someone was obviously there checking them. So I tried Twitter again asking if they could reply to my email. Completely ignored. I tried a few more times. Again nothing apart from a tweet promoting a new item of furniture. So I tried Facebook. I wrote on their wall, they deleted it! I wrote on their wall again. Deleted straight away!

You what! Do you really want to anger this beast made.com? I'm a half spanish, red headed, Scorpio. I will basically murder you. 

So I emailed again, going a bit bonkers. I couldn't believe they were ignoring me! Then I went mad and I did this (you'll have to click on the image to enlarge):

I found that if I complained in their comments boxes they didn't delete them. So I copied the same complaint into every comment box I could see (with a bloody typo in it which is REALLY annoying and kind of takes away from the 'I'm taking you DOWN made.com' feeling of it all.)

But low and behold I suddenly received an EMAIL! Guess what. They were awfully sorry but our sofa is going to be delayed. They have no idea when it will get to me but it's not even getting to them until the end of February! Wow! So what was that about 'being in touch' when anything changes? Oh right that was a load of wishy washy bullshit for your site. 

I basically said as much in my reply to them. I also told them I would never shop with them again, yada yada. Within minutes another email came through (made.com in 'Suddenly Able To Email' shocker) offering me a £25 voucher if I wanted, as way of an apology. I said no thanks. Nothing on their site is less than £20 and I'd end up paying for P&P and waiting forever anyway. Plus I kind of had to stick to my guns about the 'never shopping with them again' thing. 

So there you have it. I was angry, our sofa is probably never going to get here and I've realised how far a simple tweet can go to appease a concerned customer. Let that be a lesson to you made.com.