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Customer complaints

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jerseydevil1977

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Does anyone have a time frame on when delivery customers can call in and complain about the food they received? I feel about hour after delivery is more than reasonable. I had a customer call in yesterday afternoon complaining about her food from the night before. I apologized to her that she wasn’t happy but stressed that I can’t do anything at this point because she hadn’t called after receiving the food. Was this wrong? Thoughts?

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No time frame here.

Had that phone call come into my restaurant, I’d hope we’d respond: “Our apologies. Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We’re going to do x, y and possibly z to try and prevent that from happening again. Let us write up a credit for a free replacement of what we screwed up you can redeem the next time you order.”

It’s so difficult to earn customers and their lifetime value can be huge. Complaints are a gift because most people won’t complain directly to you when they’re unhappy. Use those opportunities to repair the relationship and build trust, not damage it further.
 
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Same day, we will replace or refund. If they call the next day they are told if they had called when the problem happened then we would have been glad to fix the problem. Unless they have a plausible reason for not calling the same day (it has happened).

There is honestly no reason not to call when the problem happens.
 
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Well I suppose a tie breaker is in order here. I agree with d9phoenix. At the same time i also respect what you do brad. I suppose if it were one of our long time regulars that we normally don’t have issues with I would be more flexible with that stance. It’s a fine line between legit issues and scams that’s why I try to set a boundary. This customer complained about something that would’ve been impossible. Our Alfredo sauce tasting freezer burned. We don’t ever freeze our sauces and we make them from scratch. She 1 star reviewed us on Google, I came to find out so damned If you do I suppose. Thanks for the input. Nobody ever said this would be easy right?

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I give a day- please don’t call me 4 days later… which people do.
At that point, there is nothing I CAN do to understand, see, rectify the problem.
I think anything beyond a day is unreasonable and clearly the problem was not important enough to be dealt with.
If legitimate, I may still send a certificate, etc depending on the circumstances issue but I am already a little annoyed.
Again, circumstances part a pretty large part here but- not a fan of the “yeah, we ordered last week and…”
 
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No time frame. Seriously, why would want to give a customer another reason to be unhappy?

They took the time to call… you now have at least a chance to turn this into something good. Turn them away you just increase the likelyhood that they turn online to get satisfaction. So what? You “won” by not giving them anything but now you lose even more than you won? Bad plan. You are stepping over dollars to pick up nickles.

I don’t care if they call me a month later, I am just glad they gave us chance to make it right.

So what if you get scammed? How often is this happening? It costs you a pizza?
 
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Bodega way I definitely appreciate you weighing in on this. I respect your opinion and the opinions of the others that have posted in here on many other threads I appreciate the fact that I can still learn something. I was hoping I was doing right apparently I did more harm. Lesson learned I will try to do better in the future to make myself better

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You know what it is… like much here, the reality and experiences are very different.
Naturally, Bodegahwy is correct.
That said, when a college student calls and says “Umm, yeah, dude… we ordered last week and the pie was burnt- can we get a free one?” I’m not too inclined.
When an adult says “We ordered Wednesday and the pie was a little dark, crazy few days but I wanted to call…”
I’m all in- no problem.
As an aside. Had a guy come into a friend’s shop a few years ago and give the most pathetic BS job about he was working at a construction site, ordered some pies and they were all burnt- nobody could even eat them. Could he get 5 more… The CSR said “Sure” and they gave him 5 free pies. As he left I walked up to him and said “Does that line work all the time?” and he replied “Yup”
 
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URNUTS said:
when a college student calls and says “Umm, yeah, dude… we ordered last week and the pie was burnt- can we get a free one?”
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I come back to wondering how often it happens. If this comes up even a few times a year I think that the value of having a consistent policy that all your crew can understand and apply outweighs the cost of giving away a few undeserved free pies.

I am sure we get scammed once in a while but I seriously doubt that it is once a month. Not worth spending bandwidth worrying about.

With respect to burnt pies… you must run deck ovens? Never happens with a conveyor. Makes that one go away at least.
 
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Nope- conveyors.
That’s why I always laugh when somebody says “Yeah- it was black- completely burnt”
I spend 20 years in college stores so… that’s my base, so to speak.
The scenario I mentioned was 5x a night back in college stores. That’s no longer the case and you are correct, for the one or two times… not worth the effort.
I’m a petty guy, sometimes, and that can be counterproductive. Your mentality is the better… I’ll get there! 🙂
 
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URNUTS said:
Nope- conveyors.
That’s why I always laugh when somebody says “Yeah- it was black- completely burnt”
I spend 20 years in college stores so… that’s my base, so to speak.
The scenario I mentioned was 5x a night back in college stores. That’s no longer the case and you are correct, for the one or two times… not worth the effort.
I’m a petty guy, sometimes, and that can be counterproductive. Your mentality is the better… I’ll get there! 🙂
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Had someone complain about a Large cheese pizza last week. They said there was barely any cheese, it was over cooked, was too thin and had no sauce. I just gave them credit, wasn’t worth arguing, we have conveyors, there’s no way it was burnt. Larges were stretched and ready for the dinner rush so the wrong doughball wasn’t used by accident. We have charts for everything. Everything is weighed and sauce is eyed by an overflowing ladle. Every single component of a Large cheese pizza was wrong… offered to send them a new pizza and they said no, gave them credit. They probably didn’t have a problem and just wanted something for free.

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I’m seeing a lot of people offering credits. we do that as well. what if they want a refund , they don’t want a credit they don’t want us to remake the food what do you do in that scenario? do you refund the money? Asking because I’ve had that scenario play out as well.

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jerseydevil1977 said:
I’m seeing a lot of people offering credits. we do that as well. what if they want a refund , they don’t want a credit they don’t want us to remake the food what do you do in that scenario? do you refund the money? Asking because I’ve had that scenario play out as well.

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Depends on the level of the screw up. If everything went entirely wrong and was a legitimate problem, you have to do everything possible for damage control. We’ve comped huge orders before. If someone says a pizza was wrong we’ll give them credit, if they insist on their money back, then they can take it or leave it with the credit

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I am surprised no one has brought this up yet, but if you have a POS,

TRACK IT.

If this customer habitually is calling for a free / messup pizza you will be able to find out who your scammers are. ALL credits are in the POS. Under a phone number. This way we can find the customer, find the credit, etc. Then when we give them a credit we type a note in explaining what they complained about, what we did, and sometimes we will note if we feel it’s a valid complaint.
 
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durbancic said:
I am surprised no one has brought this up yet, but if you have a POS,

TRACK IT.

If this customer habitually is calling for a free / messup pizza you will be able to find out who your scammers are. ALL credits are in the POS. Under a phone number. This way we can find the customer, find the credit, etc. Then when we give them a credit we type a note in explaining what they complained about, what we did, and sometimes we will note if we feel it’s a valid complaint.
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Yeah we track ours, the only problem is all the different phone numbers, then you need to track by address. Our POS won’t allow a credit without it being recorded

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Yes I wish point of success would combine phone numbers under one address instead of making 5 or 6 accounts.

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jerseydevil1977 said:
Yes I wish point of success would combine phone numbers under one address instead of making 5 or 6 accounts.

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Be careful what you ask for. Revention automatically combines all phone numbers that go to the same address. This sounds like a good idea in theory. But in practice it FUCKS the database up beyond all hell when someone gets as delivery to a different address. It cross links that new phone number and address and screws everything up.

It gets so bad sometimes that i just DELETE BOTH customer sets from the database and make them start over. I miss TMS for having a database linked by phone number and addresses being separate.
 
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