zonkered.net

When I started dropping pounds like…something you drop a lot, I don’t know, I came up with a strategy of listing what I had, what I wanted, and what I had but was going to be way too big and not worth altering. On the latter list was both my denim skirt and my corduroy skirt. The denim one is your basic dark denim pencil from Levi’s, and I haven’t really looked for a replacement yet, but the corduroy was a bright orange a-line (it fit more like a pencil skirt when I was bigger) from Gap, and I started looking for a replacement for that as soon as I realized I’d need one.

Apparently there aren’t that many corduroy skirts out this autumn. Boden had a few options, more than I wanted to spend, Patagonia had one, Garnet Hill had one. And White House Black Market had one.  Ultimately that’s what I went for, and a week ago I placed the order online.

That’s when it got a little weird. When I got the email, it said my corduroy skirt was backordered, and there’d been no indication of that on the website. In addition, even though it’d been backordered, they’d charged me for it. So I did something I never do: I called them.

This is where the amazing part starts. When I called, I got a woman named Sharon, who, when looking at my order, agreed it sounded odd. She put me on hold, called the warehouse and got nowhere, got back on the line with me where she apologized, said there wasn’t any information, but she’d contact me if there was any change.

All of this is pretty typical, right? I’ve worked customer service before, and that’s what we’d say to get off the phone. Normally we had our hands about as tied as the customer, and finding out information is hard, takes time, and we’re answering the phone all day. I didn’t expect to hear back.

Except I did. On Monday of this week, Sharon called me to let me know that she still hadn’t tracked down the reason for the weirdness, but she’d talked to her supervisor, and she thought the skirt was being quality-checked. Was there anything else she could do for me? I was too surprised to say anything other than no, and thank you.  I definitely thought that would be the last time I’d hear from her.

But no. On Wednesday I got another call from Sharon to let me know that my skirt was being shipped out that day, and I’d get tracking confirmation by the next day via e-mail. (Which I did, and the skirt will be here this weekend or early next week) (and will hopefully be in my mailbox because I hate going to the post office)

This is amazing customer service. No one does this anymore; I didn’t do this when I worked customer service, and more than anything else, no matter how the skirt works out, Sharon is the number one reason I’ll shop at White House Black Market again. That’s marketing you can’t buy.