As a rule in life I always give postive responses to positive customer experiences. Customers do by our very nature complain when matters go wrong so I believe it is equally important that we praise good customer service both when it happens first time and when issues are resolved. As someone who works in customer service I handle customer complaints and therefore value positive feedback when it also comes.
At this time in my work role I am handlig a complaint that has began six months ago. It is very easy to look at the latest issue and respond to that but what I explain to my colleagues is that the customer’s frustration has been building up over a long period of time and the latest issue is simply the last straw that led to the complaint.
My issue with Gearbest.com goes back to November 2020 – six motnhs ago. It is a long drawn out story of an online retail store that advertises products on its website with shipping dates but, in my case, then informs me the website information is untrue and the product is out of stock. I have now spent four months in a circular debate with Gearbest.com customer service cutting and pasting their standard response telling me to find another similar product only for them to tell me – although the products have a shipping date – they are out of stock. The outcome is that I asked to make a complaint and was found a product in stock and told it was shipping – only to be then told it was out of stock – and I am back at square one with my complaint somehow resolved?
I also placed a review on trustpilot.com of my frustrating experience highlighting how their customer support is simply not set up to resolve problems, merely to push them back on the customer who then may simply give up. Gearbest – knowing my ticket number – then flagged my review as not genuine – a provocative act (TrustPilot have since verified my review). I have followed up with their suggestion and placed another ticket as a “TrustPilot complaint”. The fact is Gearbest.com do not acknowledge on their website the concept of a complaint. So I remain sceptical of raising another ticket.
It is worth adding here that I have bought from Gearbest.com many times over a period of ten years without any issues so there is no grudge or malintent here, I simply want my order handled professionally to resolution.
My thoughts on this are that Gearbest ticket process is not designed to handle complaints – they have no clear way of resolving them with customers. After six months of no progress I have attempted to nudge Gearbest into escalating the matter to a senior customer service person but it seems impossible to go beyond the robotic responses in their ticket process. Now their customer service staff have stopped “supporting” the resolution of my complaint. From my experience I know that all this takes is for a more senior customer service at Gearbest to take responsibility for the case and see it through to resolution, and I become a satisifed customer again. Which is what I am doing with the complaint in my work role.
