To view all of my content about brand experience, please click here.

Another quick Brand Experience Project post today, after an unfortunate experience with a brand that is new to me.

During the Olympics, I became enamored with Sarah Robles, a badass weightlifter from the US, who won a bronze medal!  As is standard procedure now, I searched for her and started following her on Instagram. I was even more excited when I saw that she had a brand partnership with 360 Stretch Denim by Svoboda. (Total props to Svoboda for this. 1, Sarah is an amazing example of a plus-size woman killing it, and 2, having her lift in the jeans to show their stretch power is genius.) I couldn’t remember having heard of the brand, but I made a note to check them out, since I am fairly obsessed with finding the perfect pair of jeans.

I went on their website and was sold on the shape and the dark wash. The website was standard, so I won’t review that, but the shipping experience is where I start to have issues.

My order is shipped! This is great.

It starts to go downhill when 6 days later, the tracking link tells me that USPS hasn’t received the item yet, and I expected it to have been delivered.

More upsetting is that no one writes me back until September 2 – after I send another email, and then post a comment on one of their Instagram photos asking for someone to get back to me.

“I got this series of emails now. They were in junk. Sorry.” This is not the tone I would expect after having to reach out to a company multiple times about where my items are in the shipping process. You’ll note also that while the first email indicates that I will receive an update in an hour, I do not receive said email until the following day. An update email with a message of “My apologies again for the delay, I am now waiting to hear back from USPS and will get back to you as soon as I hear from them” would be preferable.

The second email is much friendlier. I appreciated the second shipment, but was surprised that Jessica didn’t indicate to me that the shipment had been upgraded to priority, which meant that I received my jeans in 2 days.

In addition to this unfortunate correspondence, I went back to Instagram to get a screenshot of my question, only to find that my question has been deleted.

This is the image I commented on. It isn’t there anymore, because it was deleted. My question was pretty innocuous, so I am baffled as to why they deleted it, instead of taking the opportunity to show how quickly and well they could respond to a customer issue.

In my work for Noritake, we have only ever deleted one Facebook comment, and that’s because it was HIGHLY offensive and inappropriate. I am a strong believer in addressing customer issues publicly – not only because it is vital to answer customer complaints, but it creates a public record of service. In addition, if I was irritated enough about a deletion, I would probably feel compelled to post MORE about my experience, creating a bigger issue. This is a miss by the Svoboda social team.

Tweet me with your thoughts on companies that delete customer questions!

Save

Save

Save

Save

Save