There are a few things I really hate. And two of them happened today.
First one is people who work with customer service without having the least bit of interest in customer service. I’ve worked for years with support and customer service and I may not be the most service oriented person in the world with a constant smile, but I do like to help people and make their day better and I love to make things work like clockwork. In the past 2 weeks since our freezer gave up the go I’ve had to call a few customer service people and only the one guy at Bosch impressed me, but the other 5 people I talked to at Bosch and the people at If weren’t that well trained in customer service. But when we finally did get our payment from the insurance company we ordered a freezer from an internet retailer. Good prices and good service over the web and on tuesday morning I placed the order since they had it in stock. On Thursday it still hadn’t shipped, so I called them and got a complete nonsense reply from someone at their customer service that basically didn’t do anything to help me or anything. And today at lunch they finally upgraded my status to “shipped”.
And that’s when the other thing I hate came into play. I hate when PR people twists and spin things to make it sound better. Because they included a link to the distributor. And according to them they haven’t received the package. Only a notification about the package they are picking up this afternoon. This isn’t uncommon practice, I order on the web frequently so I know the routine. But I get annoyed at some PR person at “trettio.se” who thought it sounds better to print out “Shipped” as status when in fact it hasn’t been shipped, only “Notification sent to distributor”. But that’s confessing that they still haven’t physically sent the package. So now, according to these two websites, our big ass freezer is lost in cyberspace! I hate that. At my old work they instructed us to “spin” our weekly reports about disruptions in the IT systems. And I hated that too.
After the 6th phonecall to Bosch I managed to get someone on the phone who could go on record with a exact figure how much it’d cost to fix our freezer. Fortunately for us it was a big number and once I had that I armed myself for another round with the insurance company. Only to have them say “ok, that’s that, so I’m sending 10 000 SEK your way, should be in your bank account before the weekend. Anything else?” 🙂
So now we ordered a new freezer with the extra service of them taking care of our old one since our car isn’t big enough for it. And money over for a “kräftskiva” this weekend as well. It’s all good right now, on that front anyway. Unfortunately Sam has come down with something so Helena is home with him.
I haven’t had many dealings with insurance companies in the past. But now our freezer gave up so it was time to go at them!
Basically 12 days ago when we opened our freezer it wasn’t freezing anymore and everything had thawed up. We had to throw away alot, alot! of food! But after a quick defrosting problem it went back to freeze-mode again. But 2 days later it gave up and decided life as a refrigerator was better and kept a cool +7 degrees Celsius.
At first I called the insurance company wanting money back for the ruined food, something I found out by a colleague that it’s actually covered! I called them up with the aggressive attitude that “they are the enemy and I will have to fight for every crown”. But I was pleasently surprised when the first response was “no problem, this is covered and we’ll sort this out for you”. So I dropped my guard and politely assisted them with their request for information. And when it totally broke down I called them again to upgrade the claim and I was met with the same helpful “we’ll sort this out for you”-response and I gladly assisted with more information about the freezer. Little did I know this was all a part of their evil scheme to give me as little money as possible because now, when it’s close to payout time I am finding myself having to fight for every crown!! Had it been like that from the start I wouldn’t have been surprised or pissed, but I’m pissed at how in two weeks time it’s gone from “no problem, we’re gonna sort this out” to treating me like an enemy! If this goes sour I might not be their customer for long, because as it is we’re only customers because we haven’t bothered to switch. Much like our bank that I’m hoping got something to think about when we fulfilled our ultimatum of switching banks if we didn’t get the interest rate that I wanted.
Right now the ball is in Bosch Home Appliance court coming up with a guestimate how much it’ll cost to fix the freezer.