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This is intended as a complementary article to my "The Art of Turboing," which describes how to "turbo" your problem to a company's management structure when normal channels just aren't giving you reasonable service.
It also describes the abysmal customer service that CompUSA provides.
Corporate executives, this is an object lesson for you: here is how you can alienate a customer and not only lose their business, but turn them into an enemy.
Disagree with what I have to say? Please see the newly added Frequently Asked Questions section; it may address your objection.
Having saved my hard-earned money, I was ready to treat myself to an extravagance: the Apple Cinema Display, a 22" widescreen LCD. This unit was listed on CompUSA's web site at $2,627.26, before tax and shipping.
I knew that I could purchase this same item from Apple directly for $2,400, but that would require taking out a line of credit with Apple. I already had a CompUSA credit card, and had received a flyer indicating that purchases this summer over $500 would qualify for six months without interest.
This display is not available in CompUSA's retail stores; it's only available via special order and their website.
I placed the order on the site. The first oddity came when I was ready to check out.
I live in an apartment building. I work downtown. Obviously, I didn't want this very expensive, lightweight, all too portable piece of equipment sitting in the apartment hallway all day. I wanted it shipped to my place of work. (At the time, my apartment complex would not hold packages at the office.)
A notice on CompUSA's site, in a pop-up window, informed me that they would not ship to an address not listed on the credit card. It advised me to contact my credit card company at the number listed on the back of the card. This is supposedly a fraud prevention measure.
Treat your customer like a criminal. Nothing makes your customers feel more loved than the insinuation that they're all out to defraud you. In this case, CompUSA's policy seemed very unusual--I had never seen another mail-order computer company that requires you to list your shipping address with your credit card company. Generally, the credit-card companies are quite good at detecting and preventing fraud. Taking steps like this, which have no visible benefit to the consumer and make the purchasing process cumbersome and unpleasant, drives customers away even before they make their first purchase. It's starting off on the wrong foot.
Before proceeding, I called CompUSA's credit company at the number listed on the card. (CompUSA's consumer credit cards were administrated by a company called HRS USA.) The representative on the phone had no idea what I was talking about, and told me that there was no way to associate a shipping address with the card. I was given the option of changing my billing address to my workplace. I can't see any reasonable person doing that. Since it was impossible for me to do what CompUSA wanted, and the request was highly unusual, I ignored it and went on with the order.
Don't coordinate your divisions. CompUSA apparently enacted this shipping-address policy without consulting their own bank to ensure that the policy could be carried out by those customers closest to them. Customers with a private-label credit card are the closest things a major retailer has to a captive audience. Making their life difficult is a good way to alienate them.
Ignore your own data. In order to get the CompUSA credit card in the first place, I had to provide information about my place of employment. I had already given them my work address... but apparently that data wasn't anyplace accessable. If CompUSA had made reasonable use of data it already had, it could've verified my ship-to address without any action on my part.
I wrote to the CompUSA webmaster about this, and the reply was "This is the first I have heard that you dont [sic] do it that way. I will find out what is going on." That was the last I heard from CompUSA's webmaster.
Don't involve the webmaster. Apparently the webmaster for the CompUSA store wasn't privy to the discussions, or lack thereof, regarding the shipping address requirement. The webmaster also didn't do much to help me, such as forwarding the query on to the sales department.
I placed the order with overnight shipping. The site indicated that the monitor "usually ships within 24 hours," so I expected it to ship on Wednesday, and arrive Thursday.
Continue to Part 2: The Catch-22
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