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My story of how Best Buy did the right thing |
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Written by Kelly Rush
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Friday, 19 September 2008 |
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I wanted to post this story online, because it should be told.
For those of you that don't know, customers who purchased HD-DVD players from Best Buy before February 23rd, 2008 were issued $50 gift cards to ease the pain of the death of HD-DVD. Or they were supposed to be issued gift cards. I know that many people did receive them (see this thread in the SlickDeals forums), but not all when they were supposed to, and in my unfortunate case, not at all.
I wrote to Best Buy's customer service department, and informed them that I still had not received my gift card. To detail a short history of the case, I never received my gift card initially, so in mid-June 2008 I called Best Buy about it. They said I was not on the list. I gave them my receipt information, and they said that it would be about 6-8 weeks to get the card. Fast-forward to mid-September 2008 (around 12-13 weeks), and still no gift card.
Alright, so I e-mailed their customer service. They basically said they could not help me, and that I should call their 800 number. Now, I try to be a patient person, but I spent almost an hour of my time before getting this problem fixed (or so I thought). I wrote back to the customer service person and said (in summary) that I was not happy, not willing to call back, and that I would factor all of this in to future purchases. I know that a lot of times customer service is in a whole different department and has their hands tied, so I went ahead and CC'd their CEO, Brad Anderson.
That was yesterday; today I received a call. I was in a meeting so I couldn't take it, but looked the number up when I got back to my desk and saw that it was from Best Buy. The lady who called (Sarah) left a message stating that they were very sorry about the problem, and would like me to call back, so I did that. I got ahold of Sarah (she gave me her direct number), and she again apologized for the mixup, explained that the department that handled this was outside of her (like I figured), and that to make up for my troubles she was going to issue me a $75 gift card instead! She said she had talked to their CEO, and that he was upset to learn that people were having this kind of trouble. I told her I understood, and thanked her for taking care of my case.
I just wanted to make sure to get this story out there. Companies get a lot of bad press and reviews on the Internet (and often deservedly so), but most people don't take the time to explain how they had a good resolution because a company came through and did the right thing. Thank you to Brad Anderson, CEO of Best Buy for passing this along to the proper channels to get it resolved, and thank you to Sarah (hopefully spelled correctly) for taking the time to call me and work out a resolution. |
