CC, a friend, was bursting with understandable frustration when she wrote this guest post. The incident she described happened at a NJ Home Depot.
The day she submitted the story the company was in the news. It’s “among the biggest gainers” wrote Ryan Dezember and Corrie Driebusch in “A Rare Bright Light in Retailing.” The Wall Street Journal reporters attributed the rise in stock prices of big boxes in the home improvement sector to booming US house prices and construction. After reading about this transaction, you wonder how this happened: Untrained, unmotivated staff wasted the customers’ time and their own.
CC wrote: “On Sunday we went to Home Depot to order a rug for our kitchen, which meant picking out an office or indoor/outdoor carpet to be bound in a custom size. Simple, right? I’ve done it before. This time Home Depot dropped the ball repeatedly.
Mistake 1: There were two sales people in the carpet department, seated at the desk. One was busy with a customer. The other was playing with her tape measure. I approached and explained what I wanted and why. She barely looked at me and told me I needed to go to the garden department. I explained that I’d placed a similar order in this department before and that I knew what I wanted was here. She grudgingly got up and gestured toward a rack before resuming playing with her tape measure. This sales clerk did NOT want to help me or make a sale!
Mistake 2: I found what I wanted and approached the other sales clerk, who was now free. I explained what I wanted and asked him to ballpark price it out. He instantly tried to talk me into buying a stock item – because, he said, it was cheaper, I wouldn’t have to wait three weeks, etc. I explained that it wasn’t an issue of price or time but size and style. He grudgingly calculated (with some difficulty) the cost. This sales clerk wanted an easy sale, not one that made him work.
Mistake 3: After finalizing the carpet choice, I went back to the second clerk and said I wanted to place the order. He had started to write it up when a young sales clerk came into the department to start her shift. He instantly insisted that she complete the transaction “to get credit for it.” She said she had no experience with a custom order that involved binding. He insisted and then left. This guy REALLY didn’t want to work and was willing to let his young colleague struggle to help us.
Mistake 4: Eventually, all three of the clerks got involved in calculating the cost and completing the paperwork. They all seemed so uncertain how to do this, I felt impelled to check their math at each step. No one was sure about where the order would be shipped, and no one told us that we’d be putting down 90% and then paying a balance on delivery. The order was finalized, we thought, and I paid with a credit card. The process was far too complicated and the clerks were not properly trained.
Mistake 5: After my card was run, the system would not finalize the deal. It kept saying we hadn’t paid.
- The older two clerks insisted we go pay at checkout.
- The younger one knew how to check whether our card actually had been charged. It had.
- Just then, the store’s assistant manager showed up. He could see three clerks working with two obviously distressed customers, so he stopped to ask what was wrong. He did NOT look at or engage with us then or over the next 20 minutes. He sat and played with his cell phone, taking calls, while they went through the whole thing again.
- Eventually, he had the young clerk call HD’s central tech office in Atlanta.
- The young clerk, however, was very apologetic and professional as she tried to sort it out. The assistant manager quite obviously wanted to be anywhere else. Tech couldn’t help, and the young clerk shut down her terminal and tried another one with no luck. Senior management ignored us and never apologized!
Mistake 6: It had now been at least an hour since I first asked for a price. Other clerks would buzz by the desk and try to chat up the three clerks we were working with. Finally, another manager came and took things over. The assistant store manager left without a word. When the new manager could get nowhere, she apologized and told us to leave – that they would figure it out and call us by the next morning. Home Depot wasted more than an hour of our time before cutting us loose.
At that point, I was prepared to cancel the whole thing and go somewhere else – a sentiment I’d expressed to the clerks several times.
What they did right: The young clerk called me later and again apologized profusely, telling me nothing had been resolved but promising to call me next morning. When I opened my email the next day, the transaction had gone through. She called me within minutes to explain what had happened with the computer system and to apologize profusely once more. Her apologies were genuine. She and the second manager, alone, had behaved professionally. She told me that the second manager was giving us the carpet ($300) at no charge. Later that day, I got an email update showing that the order had been fast-tracked and would now be completed in a week instead of three.
Will I ever place a custom order again at Home Depot? No way! The company finally did the right thing, but all the wrong steps along the way gave us an insight into the company that was extremely unflattering. I go into Home Depot under duress as it is (my husband practically lives there). I prefer to go to a hardware store. Now I will, at every opportunity.
How does a district manager inspire catatonic staff at an individual store to treat each sale with care? When salespeople pass the buck and act uninspired is it because they:
- don’t think an order is big enough to bother with
- are lazy
- feel there’s nothing in it for them if they work smart and no downside to being sluggish
- don’t know better
- are not trained to be effective salespeople
While Home Depot may be doing well for the moment, the retail landscape is bleak, which portends cutbacks for millions of jobs. How can anyone in retail dare to act blasé and indifferent? Doesn’t an employee want to be chosen to stay in the event of massive layoffs? What happened to personal pride?
