Priority: Low for customers at Marinestore Chandlers

Today I got an email with some special offers from a marine store. As a keen sailor in the middle of sailing season, I was pleased to see a special offer on deck shoes. Nice copy, nice picture, good price. So I clicked on the link.

Mistake 1 - the price on the site was different than the price in the email blast. What's even worse, the "normal" or "retail prices were different. Then the discounted price was a LOT different. Higher of course. So what trust do I have in their pricing policies?

Mistake 2 - I forwarded the email to the address that they suggested I contact. What I got was the biggest slap in the face. At first glance the response is just neutral. 

Peter,

Thank you for contacting us. This is an automated response sent to you in order to confirm the receipt of your message. We will attend to your ticket as soon as possible. We've listed the details of the ticket you created below for your records. When replying, please keep the ticket's ID in the subject to ensure that your replies are tracked correctly.

   Ticket ID: JEO-265217
   Subject: Wrong pricing. Mens shoe shows as £52.99 not the advertised price.
   Department: General Enquiries
   Priority: Low
   Status: Open

You can check the status of or reply to this ticket online at: http://marinestore.co.uk/support/
 Please use the following credentials when accessing your account with us: 

   Email: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   Password: xxxxxxxxx
Kind Regards,

Marinestore Chandlers

The text of the email could be better, but they did give me a way to check the status of my complaint online.

However, I do object to their system automatically prioritising my priority as LOW. I think my query was pretty important. It prevented me from making a purchase. I was trying to do them a favour by letting them know they had a problem. 

Would it have hurt to set the default state to HIGH? After all, they could always intervene and change the default down later once they had evaluated the severity.

So, what do you think the likelihood is that I am going to patronise Marinestore Chandlers in future? In a word: LOW.

Comments

[John Lodge]

I feel that the above blog is rather unfair as it implies that Marinestore are being deliberately deceptive. The problem that you encountered was the result of a clerical error where during routine price checking and updates, the original, pre-sale price was restored erroneously. As soon as we were made aware of the problem it was fixed.

The question of message priority is quite straightforward - they are set to low so that they can be escalated if need be, it is difficult to downgrade a ticket after the event without annoying the customer. I find it hard to believe that our automated response was "the biggest slap in the face".

I note that this was posted prior to contact being made with the company. To make assumptions such as above without checking with the Company first is rather poor. Marinestore is rightly very proud of it customer service, we need our customers to be happy and the relationships long term.

People and by implication, organisations do make mistakes, it is how the errors are corrected that is important.

[Peter Davies]

John believes I am being unfair, but I think that trust is extremely fragile on the web.

The question of message priority is quite straightforward and so is my interpretation. John finds it hard to believe. Well, believe it. I was annoyed.

John also says that this was posted prior to contact being made with the company. Not true. I told you about the error in an email. I couldn't have included your automated response if I hadn't made contact with you. What you meant was that I didn't phone you in your business hours. Nope. I didn't. Because the damage was done by then.