Three weeks ago I ordered a few t-shirts at Uniqlo. Within two days I received a message that they handed over the package to PostNL and I could expect my package soon. After two weeks the tracking code showed the message that PostNL was still waiting to receive the package. I therefore decided to contact Uniqlo. It took me a while to find out how the contact the company. In the end I found the contact form to send in my complaint. I entered all the relevant details in the contact form, applied ‘send a copy’ to my own e-mail address, hit the send button, and then nothing happened. Instead, the web page reloaded and returned an empty contact form. No confirmation message, no copy in my inbox. I tried another browser and failed again. I tried a third browser and, indeed, failed again. I came to the conclusion that the reCAPTCHA button is missing in all my browsers (Firefox, Chrome and Safari).
Uniqlo doesn’t provide any other option to contact customer service than this contact form. What?! The Man suggested to use Twitter. So I did. There is no Dutch twitter handle for Uniqlo, but there is one for the UK, where Uniqlo Europe is registered as a company.
@UNIQLO_UK I tried to send the customer query form on your website (twice) and failed. The reCaptcha doesn’t show (tried three browsers). Didn’t receive a copy in my e-mail either. How else can I contact you? It’s about a shipped order I still haven’t received (after two weeks)
tweet sent Dec 8th
Three days later and I’m still waiting for a response.
And then this morning the package from Uniqlo got delivered. All the barcodes were covered and this extra message was added, in German:
The message reads that this package accidentally got in the wrong sending stream. DHL received it instead of their competitor (PostNL). A hand-over was impossible and therefore they sent it back without costs.
Thanks to German gründlichkeit my lost package returned. Contacting Uniqlo has proven to be impossible. That’s one store I will never order from again.
I have been feeding myself a steady diet of “on this day in my blog” posts, via RSS, for a good part of the year, and a good number of them, especially as we move into December, are “how could this idiot company X have done this stupid thing Y?!” And I fine myself asking “who was I angry at?” A company? A system? A person? Myself? I think we easily fall into the trap of treating being spurned by a company as though we were spurned by a person, as though we walked into a store and an employee ignored us, or insulted us. But problems like the one you point out, a broken customer service system, seem like more of a collective failure than that. The web developer who installed the CAPTCHA wasn’t feeling 100% that day, and got a parameter wrong. Or the CAPTCHA provider, upstream, changed something, and nobody noticed. Human frailty, not human spite. I’m certain that there is a person at Uniqlo who, is they knew what you went through, would be aghast, and would do everything in their power to apologize and right the situation. I know that because, more often than I probably know, I am that person, the person who screwed something up, didn’t realize it, and confounded a bunch of customers.
Also, Uniqlo makes awfully nice T-shirts.
I hear you Peter. Generally speaking, I have a lot of patience with retailers. In this case I was patient enough to wait for two weeks to get in touch with them, because all postal companies are dealing with covid-19 overload due to holiday season. But getting in touch with a company when you have a problem with a delivery is part of the core of any business selling stuff online. There is no mention of an e-mail address. There is no mention of a phone number. That’s why I turned to Twitter, a channel I normally wouldn’t use for this. And it’s not a glitch. The form, five days later, is still not functioning. But that’s not a surprise, because people having issue with the form can’t contact them to let them know. Uniqlo is a big brand. That comes with certain expectations regarding their webshop. Basic customer service should be there. I might buy stuff of them when in a store, but will not be ordering online.