How to be a good customer....

I hear how bad other retailers are all the time <G>, so I thought I'd turn the tables and offer some advice how to be a good customer!

1) Price shopping.

Go for it. It's the American Way. But don't ask for special custom work to be done on a particular model and custom quotes from all the dealers you are price shopping. The custom work takes a lot of time to spec and the maker is going to charge the same amount to all the dealers. If you are going to price shop - use standard models to get your quotes and THEN decide whom you are going to buy from. Once you make that decision, then you can proceed with the custom work quotes from your chosen deaker. It makes the dealers and manufacturers crazy to keep re-quoting the same custom work and eats up a lot of time to have five or six dealers all chasing the same quote.

2) Identify yourself.

Typically you have a real name, then a user name for a forum, and then an email address and none of the three are all related in logical fashion. For example, lets say your name is David Smith, your forum user name is XXDEY, and your email is fastboats234@gmail.com. Its very difficult to try to keep track of three ID's for one person, so include all that info in any correspondence. And for those of you that send in an email that says "Hi, this is Jack. Remember that recliner i was interested in last fall?" Well....ahhhh....no. Don't remember, sorry.

3) Keep a running email or PM conversation.

Always keep the thread. When you don't, the dealer won't know what the prior conversation was about. I spend hours searching back through saved emails trying to recall what was written a couple of weeks and some 300 emails ago.

4) Where do you live?

If you want an accurate price quote you must submit your city/state/zip. I probably get five requests a day asking me to include shipping estimates but there is no mention of where we are shipping the items to! Please include your City and State and Zip. When you send only your Zip Code, I have to go to Google to look it up.

5) Patience is key.

Its sometimes impossible to write quick replies to emails and PM's. When there are customers in the store and on the phone, and freight trucks to unload, it takes some time to get to the computer generated material. If you send an email and follow up with a phone call two hours later asking why the email or forum post hasn't been replied to, its because yours is # 17 in the que and there's been no time to get to # 1 in the que. 24 hours is average email and PM /Forum reply time.

The more info you can provide, the faster the reply! Just some hints on how to make it faster and quicker for everyone.

Duane,

Good to see that your beach vacation took the edge off!!!!!LOL

Larry

Nahh...pretty much I'm just an ole grump all the time! :)

Today I had a lady in the store who takes the Hancock and Moore leather handles upstairs to see if she can find a contrasting leather to the Cavalier Henna color I have on a City Loveseat. I was busy on the phone with a long distance customer for about 30 minutes and when I got off the phone I went upstairs to see how she was doing and had 'a moment' when I came to the top of the steps...She had taken EVERY sample off the handle rings and spread them out in a giant fan over half a dozen pieces of furniture and was sitting in the middle of all this. I was stunned. 400 leather swatches that I had alphabetically arranged on the two handles. My heart sank.

I asked her why she did that?

She said 'So I can see all the colors at once'.

I then said 'Well, did you find the one you wanted?'

'No, none of them are working for me.'

Four hundred leathers and not a one to like. Right.

As she stood up to leave I asked her 'Would you care to put those all back in order on the rings?'

She said 'I have to pick my kids up at the bus stop, they'll be home in 15 minutes or I would, sorry." And she grabbed her purse and left. I bit my tongue but I bet my face was beet red.

It took me 2 hours to put all the leathers back on the rings in order. Now when you come into my store, you will find the master H&M ring set is so tight you will need Vice Grips to remove the knurls and there's a layer of strapping filament tape over them just in case you brought your pliers with you.

BAD CUSTOMER!!!! BAD !!!!

Duane, this isn't probably the right time to ask, but why are they alphabetical and not by color? Just wondering. If I'm lookin gfor blue, isn't it more helpful to see all the blues next to each other.

Any time is a good time to ask!

Alphabetical makes them easy to find and go to. When you do them by color, you're constantly searching. When a customer brings in a color they want to match or price point they want to hit, I have all the leathers in my mind on H&M and will say "The one you want is either Aspen Saddle or Yardley Tobacco." I can find both in less than 10 seconds. If searching for color, there are about 200 browns so I would be digging for those two somewhere amongst the 200. It also makes it easier when a series is discontinued to pull the entire series.

I tried my Leathercraft handle by color a few years ago. It was miserable to go through for me as a dealer and I converted it back after three weeks of testing it that way.