I don’t normally write about things that happen in my personal life mainly because I don’t want to bore my readers away but recently my wife and I had something happen which kinda drove home the fact that even today many brick and mortar businesses have no concept of customer relations.
They like to say they do and they populate static web pages of mission statements about how much they care when in fact very few even seem to grasp the basic principals of not just that the customer is always right but that the customer expects to be treated with respect.
The launching point for this was about two weeks ago when my wife went out in the morning to the corner gas station slash corner store to pick up a couple of things. Along the way she decided to stop at the Tim Hortons (Canadian version of Starbucks for those who don’t know the name) and buy us both a morning cup of French Vanilla. Now being the person she is she also ordered a couple of small regular coffees for the people running the gas station which is something we have both done in the past.
Now unfortunately when she went to pay for the order she found that she only had a very large bill with which to pay for the coffees and as such handed it over to the lady behind the counter. This is where the first of the problems starts as the lady counted the changed to herself and handed the bills and change to my wife who trusting the counter person scrunched it up and put it in her pocket.
From there she went to the gas station and as she was paying for what she wanted there she discovered that she had been short changed by $20.00 at Tim Hortons. Thinking that this had just been a sincere mistake she stopped there on her way back home to see about getting the amount she had been short changed return to her. After explaining the situation to one of the supervisors she was taken in to the back to view the video of when she paid for her purchase. Yes they have top down video surveillance of the cash registers which in a way in this case I would have thought would be a good thing as it showed the counter person counting the change over the till drawer and then handing to my wife.
My wife says that you can see quite plainly that the counter person miscounts the change before handing it to but the supervisor watching the video with her says to my wife that there is nothing wrong you got your change - end of subject. Granted there were to mistakes here with the first being the fact that the counter person contrary to any proper retail experience didn’t count the change directly into (or in front of) my wife’s hand. The second error was my wife’s trusting nature after all you don’t expect the person behind the counter to intentionally short change you.
So she comes home upset and tells me about the incident while we’re having our now very expensive morning coffee. I being the web type person that I am figure no problem I’ll just hop over to the Tim Hortons site, find the customer service email address and fire off an email about the incident and they’ll sure to fix up the problem. Now I will admit that Dawn; the Operations Services Representative for Tim Hortons did reply quite quickly the only problem was that because Tim Hortons is a franchise operation there was nothing that she could do other than to forward my problem on to a local representative - this was the 10 of May.
The following Monday we got a phone call bright and early from said representative who sound like he was on a mobile pone in his car traveling somewhere. After my wife explained the situation to him he assured her that he would look into it and get back to her. We waited for 10 days to hear from him before I said enough was enough and sent another email to Dawn at Tim Hortons telling her exactly how unhappy I was with the situation - this was on the 21st of May.
The following morning bright and early Dawn was phoning us saying how sorry she was over the whole thing and assured my wife that Tim Hortons would make it right and that the franchise owner would be in contact with her. Which admittedly he was but as he talked on the phone with my wife I could tell it wasn’t going well - which it wasn’t. The end result was that he told her that there was nothing he could do for her.
Nothing he could do for her was his solution which as far as I am concern implies that he considered my wife to be nothing more than a liar and that she should just go away. Well as a long time customer of Tim Hortons right across this country this to me is unacceptable from a company - any company. I realize that we will never see any satisfaction from this as the owner of the local franchise doesn’t give a shit and the main office of Tim Hortons says it is out of their hands. I also realize that our measly $20.00 may not amount to a whole hill of beans to a man making a small fortune from coffee and donuts but I can tell you this - no Tim Hortons anywhere is going to get another dime of our money.
Oh and by the way - if you stop in at a Tim Hortons and use a large bill to pay for your purchase make sure to double check your change.
Conversation Tags: Tim Hortons
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