No wait. (Part 2 of 2)
How utterly frustrating is it to have one of your customers go “Hello? I asked for tile A and you sent me tile B. I clearly ordered tile A, and your paperwork says tile A but I physically have tile B in my hands right now.” And for us to go “Sorry, you should have told this to us 2 days ago. IF you want us to exchange the tiles for you, you are going to have to pay shipping costs to have the wrong tile sent back to us, and the right tile sent back to you.”
Or on a similar note. “Hey, dingus, you sent us the wrong tile. And we need this NOW.” “Uh… well unfortunately all we can offer is to ship this product to you with your next shipment.” “Hello?? Anyone home there? This is for a job that is starting tomorrow morning. We need you to courier us these boxes NOW.” “Well, we can’t just ship out boxes of tile whenever we make a mistake!” Why not exactly? Wouldn’t that get you to like… make fewer mistakes?
I have to say the most fun was most recent. We had shipped two different orders to two customers. And somehow customer A ended up missing 6 boxes from their order, and customer B received 6 extra boxes on their order. Well my boss is insisting like CRAZY that it’s the transport company that shifted the boxes from company A’s order to company B’s order. Now I’ve been told to “Deal with it” with the transport company. And the transport company obviously is going on the defensive of “We don’t touch your skids” when we say “You shifted these boxes!” And my boss is obviously saying “We packaged it right! You shifted the boxes!” Blame game. He said she said. At this point no one is going to 100% remember who put what where, or who moved what where. We just have company policy of “We’re always right” and “You are the one who’s wrong” being thrown back and forth. A lot.
And because I didn’t know how to handle the situation since all I was doing was running in circles, I was told to “Act convincing. Because if you don’t sound convincing they won’t believe you.” One problem. *I* don’t believe me. In the past X number of months that I’ve worked at this company dealing with this transport company. I’ve seen relatively few errors from the transport company. Not a bloody day goes by I don’t see errors coming out of our shipping staff.
Obviously this was not a situation I could rightly handle. One of my bosses, very annoyed like, finally took over the situation. Lord knows that the outcome is, I have no idea because no one’s told me. Even though both of the customers are customers I deal with.
I feel my time there is limited. I would welcome the thought.
