I thought about writing a long ranting post about the service Courtney and I received at the Charlotte IKEA in July. Instead, I'm going to repost here the letter that I wrote to IKEA Corporate and also copied to the Charlotte store.
IKEA Customer Service
420 Alan Wood Rd.
Conshohocken, PA 19428
To Whom it May Concern,
I meant to send this letter much earlier, but I’ve been busy getting married and moving into a new house this summer. That is what made the poor customer service I received at the Charlotte IKEA store so frustrating.
My new wife and I went to IKEA July 7, 2012, to buy a new bedside table and desk for our house. We found the table and found a desk we liked, but it was out of stock. We were told to come back later that week after a new shipment came in. On Monday, July 9, my wife called the store, where the system told her there were 19 desks in stock. We drove the 45 minutes to the IKEA only to find no desks in the bin. After talking to several employees, we realized that the desks were in the store, but on a wrapped pallet several shelves higher. We also learned about your store policy that doesn’t allow forklifts on the floor during operating hours.
While that policy is frustrating, we understand it. But we also didn’t feel that it was right for us to have to either make the long drive out to the store again the next day or wait around for several hours to pick it up after closing when we were told the desk was in stock. Eventually, a member of the store’s HR department (her name escapes us now) offered to ship us the desk, the next day, telling us it would arrive within the week. We agreed.
We paid for the desk that day, kept the receipt and gave the HR worker our physical address and email address so that she could send us the tracking number of the packages so we knew when to expect them. Nearly a week went by and we had no email and no package.
We spent the next week playing phone tag with the store’s HR department. We would call them during normal operating hours and be forced to leave a voicemail. At one point, we were asked to “confirm” our address and which desk we wanted. I take that to mean whatever employee we worked with lost all of our information. Finally, more than two weeks after “buying” the desk, someone at the store left us a voicemail saying the package had shipped and gave us the tracking number.
The desk arrived and was thankfully unharmed. But, again, it arrived more than two weeks after it was purchased. If we hadn’t been persistent, I doubt the desk would have arrived at all even though it had been paid for in full.
We both shop and IKEA regularly and have had overwhelmingly positive experiences. That’s part of the reason we were so appalled by the service we received with our last purchase.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Sincerely,
Corey and Courtney Inscoe
