customer service failure

Staples makes my head square and my face red!

I’ve been using Staples more than usual for about the last year for various reasons, and one of the things I’ve been doing is making signs for a noticeboard. For this I generally want something printed in black ink on coloured paper; nothing fancy, but not plain, white paper. However, unsurprisingly (I suppose) Staples doesn’t offer coloured paper on their self-service machines, so of course I go to the desk … for which I do expect to pay a bit more, considering I’m dealing with a paid employee.

However, what I don’t expect is a bureaucratic nightmare! Below is what I’ve just submitted to their survey system, although (to rub salt into the wound) I don’t qualify for their freebie draw because my order total was less than $20. (However, I had to scan the fine print to catch that.)

In order to get three copies on coloured paper your employee had to do four pages of paperwork that took more time than it would have taken to do the job. I realise you can’t have as many employees as you have customers, but the bureaucracy involved in your typical “quick” job would make a government bureaucrat blush with envy.

On top of that my “express” job couldn’t be done right away, and I was told it would take an hour and a half! However, within five minutes of my arriving back home a few minutes later I got a call saying my job was ready. If I had known it would only take that long I’d have returned after doing my other errand in the area.

And further, your employee told me that the express charge was an additional 30%, but when I showed up to collect my order it turned out the express charge was 2825% — yes, two thousand eight hundred and twenty-five per cent — of the base charge!

This is not my first experience like this. It’s always like this with simple orders, but I’ve had enough and decided it’s about time I said something.

SIMPLY PUT, you need a better way of dealing with orders that take less time than it takes to do the paperwork. This is just bloody stupid.

Bloody ridiculous indeed! I did time the process on a previous occasion and I think it literally took two minutes — 120 seconds — from the time the employee started talking to me to the time I walked away with my paid-for copies. But if they screw around with four pages(!) of paperwork it of course takes much longer, and so it’s no wonder they can’t do small jobs right away and have to charge an “express” fee. I went into Staples late one evening a few months ago, interrupted the kid checking her social media, and still had to pay an “express” fee! (I believe that was the occasion on which I timed the whole process.)

Staples, train your employees to differentiate between small jobs that can be done in a matter of seconds and stuff that will actually take longer to do than it takes to do the paperwork. It’s not that hard. People with small, quick jobs like me will be happy to be out of your hair in minutes, and the guy over there waiting for his thousand copies won’t have any reason to complain if the employee is off at another machine doing my three copies while his are still printing.