France This Way...the blog!!

There have been various times in the last couple of years when I’ve complained about customer service in France.

One time it was Europiscine, who fitted a new swimming pool liner for us with an expensive ten year guarantee and then refused to put it right when it immediately developed big wrinkles. Another was Dell, who delivered a computer that just didn’t work from the minute it was taken out of the box – and charged us premium rate phone call charges while the problems were corrected.

So to counterbalance these and to provide evidence that good service is possible in France I thought I’d relate a diferent story. Unfortunately I can’t think of one so I’m going to tell you about my experiences with Trek France instead, and our process of buying a Trek Madone 5.5 bike.

Background

Trek, if you didn’t know, are one of the largest bike suppliers in the world and make the bikes ridden by Lance Armstrong and many other great riders. Just to be clear I have no problem with Trek bikes and even now hope that one day, perhaps not even too far into the future, the bike I ordered will actually be ready for me to collect and ride.

With Trek Madone bikes, you select a basic model and then separately choose the ‘bits’ (gears, tyres, saddle etc) to go with it. I selected all the standard recommended parts but chose cheaper gears since that saves many hundreds of euros and frankly any of the options available far exceed my limited cycling abilities (for those with ‘bike envy’ the bike is a red Trek Madone 5.5, and the gears were Shimano Ultegra instead of SRAM or Shimano Dura-Ace).

Trek don’t allow bikes to be ordered online because they want purchasers to go to a bike shop, discuss their needs, get measured so it’s the right size etc. by the trained experts in the shop. This sounds very sensible, so I headed off to a distant shop that is one of the few of their stockists in the region of France where I live. They deliver the bikes to the shop, according to specification ordered, within 30 days.

8th September

Went to the shop to order my shiny new Trek! Planned to get a white one but they had a red one in stock that looked so impressive I changed my mind. Unfortunately the one in the shop, although a great sale price, was 56cm frame and I need a 58cm frame. So that’s what I ordered, and went home happy in the knowledge I would have the bike before 4th October, in time to catch the last of the cycling weather this year. Yippee!!

2nd october

Not long to go now, getting excited, so I email the shop to ask if they know what day I can collect it.

Response not too promising: ‘It’s the first time someone has ordered one of these bikes in our shop…complicated procedure…we lost a bit of time in placing your order…delivery delayed about 10 days so should be available mid-October. We’ve asked Trek to have it ready as soon as possible.‘

Well that’s a shame that the carefully trained staff had difficulty ordering the bike but at least I know what’s going on, and a 10 day delay isn’t the end of the world.

17th October

Let’s try again, it must be nearly ready now. I rang the shop who now seem unclear about when the bike might be ready. They promise to find out and call me back Monday when they’ve spoken to Trek.

21st October

No word at all from the shop on Monday or Tuesday (doesn’t that put you in a bad mood when someone promises to ring and doesn’t bother?), so I also contacted Trek France to see if they knew what was going on.

Had a phone call from the shop saying that mid-November was the expected delivery date, due to a problem tracking down the gears I had chosen (selected from the choices listed as available on the Trek site).

They also told me they had ordered a 56cm frame instead of a 58cm frame, so pretty much six weeks into the process the ordering process hasn’t really started.

22nd October

The day I started realising all was not well. Had a very short response from Trek Bikes saying ‘your bike was ordered 3/10/09. Your shop told you that. Your bike will be ready end November’.

Let’s have a little look at those dates again. ‘the bike was ordered 3/10/09‘. That date is AFTER the date when they told me there had been a slight delay in ordering the bike initially. So when they told me there was ‘probably a 10 day delay’ they hadn’t actually even ordered the bike. So there was not the slightest chance of a mid-October delivery.

Why would Trek then come along and say ‘the bike was ordered 3/10/09′ when I am sat here with a ticket showing clearly that it was ordered a month earlier than that. I think it’s pretty clear that the date I ordered the bike is the date that I went into the shop, said I’d like to order a bike, and handed across a deposit – regardless what anyone might say on the subject later.

Contrary to what Trek claimed the shop hadn’t told me anything of the sort and not once have the bike shop or Trek France ever contacted me to (a) tell me about the original delay (I guess they just forgot to order it but who knows) or (b) to try and find an alternative solution or (c) to apologise.

So now all I have is various emails that bear little resemblance to reality and talk as if I have been stricken with Alzheimers, a vague suggestion that the bike might be ready end November, and the knowledge that in any case the shop have ordered the wrong size frame so who knows what might turn up.

So here are a couple of handy hints if you work in the customer service department of a company in France:

1) Honesty is good. If you forgot to do something, say that you forgot to do it and how sorry you are, not pretend something else happened.

2) Keep in touch with the customer about what is going on

3) When the customer has written evidence of one thing there is little point in claiming something else.

4) Make an effort to put things right! Is the product available elsewhere in France and could be tracked down for the customer? If not, is there an alternative that could be suggested instead?

And the really annoying thing is – I still really want the darned bike or I’d ask for my money back!

Edit: see my comment below (14th November – the day I collected my new Trek Madone) for the ending to this story.