TigerDirect apology startles grouchy geek
I’m the grouchy geek, at least for today, since my laptop hard drive died. But I’m not so geeky that I’d spend any time grousing about that, since I saw (or rather, heard) it coming. The dreaded “click of death” started about three weeks ago.
Which was also about when I thought I was done with complaining about TigerDirect.com’s mishandling of my customer service inquiries … despite absolutely no help from the company, I was, in the end, able to get a replacement video card just five months after I’d made my initial inquiries about doing so. Along the way, I ranted a few times … here, here, here and here. Rather a lot, really, for an $89.95 video card. But you know — it’s the principal of the thing.
Shockingly (to me) … I got an actual apology late last week from someone who works for TigerDirect. Which actually meant more to me than getting the video card replaced. Scott B. (we’ll leave it at that) was browsing the web, ran across my blog posts and, with a minimum of fuss, had this to say:
Although I have no idea who you spoke to on an individual basis, I can surmise that it was one of our Inbound Sales Agents, and I do apologize for the response that you got from them. I would like to extend my personal apologies for the way you were treated and for the general lack of action from Tiger Direct. As you well know, companies are made up of individuals, and as a whole it is extremely difficult to make every customer experience the best that it can be. That being said, I would appreciate the ability to ‘redeem’ Tiger Direct to you, although I’m not quite sure what that would be in your eyes, so, I’ll let you decide.
Which was enough to get TigerDirect entirely off my very short shit list. It really didn’t take much, huh? Scott did say he couldn’t swing me a free TV out of the deal, which is perfectly OK since I wouldn’t know what to do with one anyway. And we went on to talk about, among other things, the movie “Iron Man.” I wanted the Robert Downey Jr.’s twin monitors and CAD/CAM setup for my home office; Scott wanted “the suit.”
Geeks.
jss @ May 19, 2008
