Wilbur Corncob's Blog April Archive

Travel Expedia Handles Payment for Hotel With Respect!

By Wilbur Corncob at 04/29/07 08:45

I recently make a hotel reservation for my wife to stay in New York City. Although...

Tags: travel • customer service •
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Really Stupid Customer Service

I saw an interesting post on another blog about customers at Walmart so I decided to email Walmart about it. Below is a transcript of the email exchange.

Basically they are asking me to contact again with the same information I contacted them with the first time. Option #2 is how I contacted them the first time.

They conclude the email saying that I should replace to it. So should I reply to the email or use their website to contact them?

Should I assume if I contact them again I'll get a different answer. If I had made a purchase would I need to go through the same contact them twice the same way procedure, or is it more than twice?

I really wanted to contact their media department, but they only offer phone numbers and no email addresses. I don't do customer service of any kind via telephone.

I am glad that I have not entered a Walmart store in over 5 years!

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Thank you for your message.

It is important to us that we address any customer concerns that are brought to our attention. If you would like to contact us, we would encourage you to do so by any of the following means:

1) Call 1-800-Wal-Mart

2) Log on to www.walmartstores.com, Click on Contact Us (located at the bottom left hand corner of the screen)

3) Write to us at the following address: Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
Attn: Customer Relations
702 SW 8th Street
Bentonville, AR 72716

Thank you,
Customer Relations

For further correspondence regarding this issue, please reply to this email.

----Your Original Comments Were----

I would be interested in your comments on one of our bloggers feelings about the manners of Walmart customers.

http://blog.get2buynow.com
Why are People so Inconsiderate?
By Lexie Elaine at 04/13/07 11:33

I find it highly aggravating that some people while shopping have so little manners.

I guess it is like driving or anything else, it is just bad manners. While shopping at Wal Mart the other day, simply navigating the aisles was a nightmare because that is where people:

* Socialize with friends they haven't seen for at least a day
* Talk on their cell phones while their cart is parked in the MIDDLE of the aisle
* Allow their children to run wild, and force you to put on your cart brakes to avoid impact
* Stand and look at a section of products for half an hour, and when people are behind them, and OBVIOUSLY want to grab something from that section, refuse to move over
* Refuse to stay on their side of the street (aisle)

I wish people would simply just have some respect for fellow shoppers, or just exercise some good manners and common courtesy.

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How to Punish a Customer

I found it ammusing that someone searching in Google, ran across my blog with the phrase how to punish a customer.

The immediate throught was here is someone looking for ways to punish their customers! A bizarre idea. Well, maybe not. I think think of a few good, real life examples:

packet8 this voip service gave me grief for "excessive international usage". After spending about US$100/month for international calling with them, every month for about 18 months. One day, however, they imposed a new policy which basically said $10+/month of international usage was excessive! I am not longer a packet8 customer.

American Airlines still wants to issue paper tickets and mail them to you for some flights!

Expedia wants you to sit on hold with them when their member hotels put a monthly subscription on your credit card when you made a hotel reservation.

Hotel Roma Plaza who put a US$60 montly subscription on my credit after I didn't stay with them because they left me stranded at the Panama City airport, apparently because their procedure for the free airport pickup is impossible to complete.

So, yes, it might well be that businesses all over the world are looking for new ways to punish their customers.

Punish the Customer

A theme of 'punish your customers' seems to abound. Technology should make any process more simple. However, if you look at many shopping carts, they state, "do not enter any spaces, dashes or non numeric characters in your credit card number", or similar jibberish. Now, if you look at your credit card (except Amex) you find that it is printed as 4 sets of 4 numbers, not one 16 digit number. What do these shopping carts expect of you? To enter one 16 digit number. Now, the ease of entering 4 sets of 4 numbers is much simpler and less error prone than one 16 digit number, especially when the point size is also set artificially small. Now, any shopping cart I have had my fingers in allows you to enter dashes, spaces or other characters for readablity. One bit of perl easily removes the spaces and dashes, for example: $cardnumber=~s/ //g; $cardnumber=~s/-//g; That would purify the card number of any customer entered spaces and dashes. Now, it would seem the programming effort for making the ordering process easier for the customer is skipped on the theory that the customer should always be punished.