We repeat your order for a reason...

[lilfunky1]

I used to work at a distribution tile company. Customers can order mainly three ways, faxing their order, e-mailing their order or phoning their order. (Sometimes they can come in and just order in person, but since immediate pick-up is almost impossible, there's really no point)

With fax and e-mail, we have proof of what they ordered to refer back to. With phone calls there isn't really anything (phones are monitored but I doubt they were all 100% recorded) So every phone order taken, is repeated back to the customer at the end to ensure we wrote/typed everything down properly. It's irritating and these guys are builders/construction so they're always super busy.

Every once in a while you'd get a customer who phoned in an order, and the next day is yelling and screaming about how they received the wrong item. Go look at the typed out list that was taken during their phone order... what's on the list is what they received.

"But it's not what I said!"
"Did you correct the CSR when they repeated the list back to you?"
"I don't pay attention when they do that!"
"Well, now you see why we do it. Perhaps you should pay attention next time."

Always the same people who don't pay attention will come back yelling at us.

Unfortunately at this company it's a total hassle to get replacement things since the warehouse was woefully understaffed. So I could sort of understand their frustration at the idea of coming all the way back to exchange the product & needing to wait sometimes up to an hour for the privilege.

[bainsidhe]

Besides phone orders being a hassle and time-consuming, it also leaves things open to interpretation. Customers get what they asked for, but then realize they wanted something different. If it's a phone order, it's a battle of he said/she said and the shipper usually loses out. So we normally like to follow-up phone orders with an email or fax approval once the customer reviews the order confirmation. Seems simple, doesn't it?

Some customers whine and moan about how much trouble it is to create an official PO. But we do it because we've been burned too many times. For that matter, some customers who DO send in a fax or email will still claim they ordered X when their PO says they needed Y. So yeah, I feel your pain.

[cawaker]

being in the construction business myself, i hate material suppliers and subcontractors.

we've been burned way too many times in the past so we are pretty strict when it comes to proper paper work.