Sears steps up and strikes out

16

Remember Phil?  In the post “When the deal goes awry” I republished a comment he had made about his attempt to take advantage of Southwest Rapid Reward’s brief 15X Sears promotion.  Phil had ordered 3 DSLR cameras, but his shipment contained only one.  I won’t recount the entire story here (please read the original post for that info), but some interesting stuff has popped up since then, so I thought I’d share.  Read on to see what happened when Sears itself chimed in:

First, Phil gave an update:

Bugger. They refunded the cameras. So this one has not worked out for me. I may get real lucky and have the points stick but I seriously doubt it. So I am now going to be left about 20k short of the companion pass. I will see how the cards fall and take stock once the points that did book crossover.

[see comment 16 for the full text]

Then, surprisingly, Mike D from Sears added a comment:

Good morning Phil,

I came across this post today and wanted to contact you. My name is Mike and I am a member of the Sears Social Media Support team. I am sorry to see that you did not receive all three of the cameras that you ordered. It is always irritating when an order is not fulfilled correctly, much less when the order is based on a time-sensitive promotion such as in this instance. While I am happy to see that you have contacted our Online Solutions group, if you would allow me the opportunity, I would like to connect you with a dedicated case manager to discuss your experience and reach a mutually acceptable resolution in this matter. At your convenience, please contact our office via email at smsupport@searshc.com so you don’t have to be upset by this any longer. In the email, please provide a contact number and the phone number the cameras were purchased under (if different than the contact phone number) and we will call you directly. In addition, please include your Screen name (Phil) in the email for reference to your issue. Again, we’re sorry for any trouble we have caused and we hope to talk to you soon.

Thank you,

Mike D.
Social Media Moderator
Sears Social Media Support

This sounded promising right?  Well, Phil gave us another update:

I wanted to provide a final update here. As you can see Sears Social Media tried to put out the fire here by responding on the board and I took them up on their offer of help. I genuinely thought they would be helpful. However after a couple of emails, couple of calls, they just called to say there is nothing they can do. I am often very cynical of commercial social media as they are just there to try spin bad situations, but sometimes they can be great, but in this case, thanks Mike D for frankly pretty much nothing.

And if you recall the issue is they cancelled the order because they said they were out of stock. I had spoken to customer service who told me that they would try to locate stock but if they could not, only then would they cancel the stock. So I decided to call my local Sears, which is 2 miles from my home, and were showing online they had two in stock. Customer service had given me some mumbo-jumbo that stock levels online are not necessarily accurate. Anyway I call the store and got through to a very helpful lady who said her computer was showing there were two in stock in store. I asked her if she could verify and she literally walked into the store-room and found them and said “yep they are here”. I gave this information to the social media response people in the hope that they would be able to take that and use it to fulfill the order. STILL THEY FAILED! These guys are absolutely freaking useless. The customer was able to do with a five minute call what multiple customer service and social media clowns collectively failed to do on multiple locations, and that is fine the stock they needed to fulfill the order – and that is within 2 miles of his darn home!!! Lord knows how many more there are if I expanded nationwide.

So one big lesson from all this, if you really need to actually buy something other than for points, NEVER use Sears. They SUCK.

Mike D, are you reading this?  Care to respond?

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