Small Office, Home Office Information

Does your small business have protocols in place to deal with problems when they arise?

We’ve just found a major office supplier here in our country that doesn’t have one to cover the problem that has arisen with goods that we just purchased.

We ordered a bookcase earlier in the week to be delivered as a flat pack by courier and Toni paid for it by direct deposit into their bank account.

The bookcase arrived and I began to assemble it only to find that one side of the case was damaged and could not be used.

The office supply company promises to replace damaged stock if they are notified of the damage within three days of delivery so we contacted them.

After some uncertainty on their part they decided to ship another flat pack - when it arrives I’m to take out the corresponding part to the damaged one - place the damaged part in the replacement pack and then the courier will return it to the warehouse.

No problem so far - but now they want to charge us for the second flat pack. Of course, they promise to refund the money as soon as the damaged part arrives at their warehouse.

That’s where the problem arises - how can they refund anything when the original payment was via direct deposit? Even they admit that could be a problem and now they have gone away to think about it?

I’m sure I saw steam coming out of Toni’s ears when I went into her office a few minutes ago. She’s threatening to stop dealing with them … and they used to be her favourite office supplier before this happened.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 3:23 pm and is filed under General Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.