It was my birthday, the 29th of July, the first birthday in the middle of a lockdown, and I felt like spoiling myself in addition to the pressies fromTracey and the kids. So I ordered a 6-pack of Oakridge VS Henk Vineyard Chardonnay 2019 from Grays, one of the last sources I could find that had stock left after a rave review and a 97 points score from Huon Hooke.
The order confirmation promptly arrived in my inbox, saying ‘here’s a copy of your invoice.’ They also sent me a $10 ‘Welcome to Grays’voucher, with a note that said: ‘Dear member, welcome, we’re so excited you’ve decided to join Grays! Assuming that you’re a Grays novice, here’s a quick intro to what you can expect.’
Dear member? Assuming you’re a Grays novice? I’ve ordered wine from this outfit a number of times over the years, so why don’t they know me?
Is there anybody out there?
On August 3, I received another voucher, this time for $40. I bit more generous, I thought, how nice. Then I wondered why I hadn’t seen a dispatch notice for the wine I’d bought, so I checked to make sure I hadn’t overlooked it. No, I had not.
I sent an email to Grays Customer Support, and their computer shot back a support ticket number and this note:
‘Thanks for contacting the Grays support team. We have received your request and will be in contact within 2 business days.For answers to Frequently Asked Questions, why not browse our Help Centre on the link below? https://www.graysonline.com/content.aspx?block=FA Regards, Grays Support Team.’
My first thought was: why would it take up to 2 days to answer the simple question: when will you ship my wine? I buy a lot of wine from a number of wine merchants, and they respond promptly on the same day.
I thought I’d cheer myself up with that $40 voucher, and looked around the site to see if they had more good chardies. Yes, they did: they had the 2018 Henk chardy, a real favourite in our house but long gone from retail. Yet here it was, so I grabbed a 6-pack and headed for the checkout to see if the deal was real. The landing page said it was, so I copied the voucher number into the box and clicked the GO button.
It refused. When I looked for reasons why, I saw a tiny note under the voucher box that said ‘please enter a valid number.’ I double-checked the number but no go.
Don’t let me down
A second email followed later that day, this time from a lady called Charmyne. It said: ‘Hi Kim. I am sorry to hear you haven’t received your order. Please allow me to look into this matter as I need to liaise with this concern internally. I’ll get back to you within 1 to 2 business days or as soon as I receive an update. My apologies for any inconvenience it may have caused you.’
I tried to envision Grays’ warehouse somewhere in Sydney’s west, where they sell anything from wine to babies’ toys to garden furniture to electronics and trucks. Maybe they’d upgraded it to compete with Amazon, where they have small armies of casuals rushing around filling orders, and getting told they don’t need to return the next day if they hadn’t filled enough orders.
Or maybe they were all locked down at home, and left a skeleton crew of casuals at the warehouse.
‘Hey Fred, do you know where they keep the wine around here?’
‘Haven’t come across it, mate. Behind the garden furniture? Or the trucks maybe?’
‘Mm, I’ll go and have a look.’
‘Please don’t get lost. We still haven’t found Frank and Louise.’
Help me if you can, I’m feeling down
The two days passed without incident, and without another message from Charmyne. All I got was a note from Grays asking if I wanted to complete the order I had started (for the second 6-pack).
I picked up the phone to customer service, worked through the options, waited for half an hour listening to 56 repeats of ‘we’ll be with you shortly’, no advice on place in the queue, no time estimate when someone would help – nothing.
I hung up and sent an email to customer service instead. Yes, you guessed it: the computer’s response was prompt, identical to the first one, accompanied by another support ticket.
Two days later, we went through the same pantomime, though this time the phone lady offered a call back if I pressed 1. I did, but I’
m still waiting. I fired off another email to customer service, with the words ‘appalling customer service’ in the subject box, and a third robotic email came back …
Tell me Why
It was now August 7, about 10 days after this painful affair began. I thought of calling Grays’ head office and ask to talk to the guy in charge of grayswine, but decided against it. I didn’t have more time to waste; instead I found boss man Greg Fitzsimmons on LinkedIn and sent him a message about my experience, supplied my email address and offered to tell him what happened.
Nothing came back yet, every day since they welcomed me, I got at least 3 emails offering me anything from fancy watches, jewelry, chainsaws, laptop computers, hand-made rugs, water purifiers, cool gel mattresses, Para Port, Tiffany & Co Solitaire rings, and Natural Stone Bathtubs and Basins.
And every other day, an email would remind me that I hadn’t completed that order for more wine, and that my voucher was running out on August 16.
The Long and Winding Road
I sent another email to customer Support on Tuesday August 10, not expecting a real answer. By now I was curious to find out how much longer these people could keep up this cruel charade.
On August 13, my lucky day, an email from Charmyne arrived. Was she perhaps the only real person in this game of drones? It said:
‘Unfortunately, we have been advised by the vendor that this item is no longer available due to a stock discrepancy. As such, I will be organising for you to be issued with a full refund of the item and any subsequent freight charges. The refund of 203.94 will be processed back to the registered payment method for this invoice. Please allow up to 10 business days for the refund to be processed and for the cleared funds to reach your account. Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience this has caused you.’
I sent this response: ‘Charmyne, in the one and only email I received from a real person at Grays (I think) you promised to look into this on August 3. That was 10 days ago, and 5 days after I ordered the wine. Now you tell me you can’t fulfill the order, and you’ll take another 10 days before I get a refund? This is appalling customer service, no it’s the opposite of customer service – it’s an absolute disgrace.’
From me to you
This time her response was swift. ‘I’m sorry to hear that you were not totally satisfied with your recent interaction with Grays. We are always striving to improve the service that we offer to our customers and so we appreciate you taking the time to provide us with this feedback. It has been forwarded to the appropriate department head so that we can address the issues you have raised. Thank you and I hope that you decide to try us again in the future.’
Dream on Charmyne. Not a sausage from Grays 3 weeks later. Clearly you folks at Grays live in a different world from most of us mortals, a world where we wait patiently for our turn, which may never come. A world where you talk to customers when you feel like it, which is not often. A world where no one seems to care, where support is a foreign concept, and where customers are dispensable.
What could I salvage? I could write a blog post, and share it with my subscribers. I could find out how to make that $40 voucher work for the Henk Chardonnay 2018. Love that wine, but I’d have to go through another interminable session on the phone. Let’s check if it’s real, I thought – just as well I checked, because it was another mirage that vanished when you got close to it.
Kim