E-mail Entitlement! Is there no escape ?!

[phillippbo]

Mmm...the phone always has that nice little hang-up button

Or the mute button so I can have my MBT (Mute Button Tourettes) moment...

[Kyree]

Mmm...the phone always has that nice little hang-up button Though yes..I'm sure you'd get in trouble for doing it...it'd be fun to picture the person's face.

[Dips]

A new expression: email entitlement. I like it!

I find the best part of dealing with email idiots is that you have a nice written record of what you said which can easily be copied and pasted if you need to repeat it.

Also, if they get crazy or abusive you can very easily take the drastic step of ignoring or even blocking them if necessary. That's not so easy to do on the phone or in a face-to-face encounter.

[Lulu]

So my shop takes orders for books via our email/website. No worries there, actually makes life quite easy for us the majority of the time. It's all laid out nice and clearly ont he site, tells them all the info we're going to need to do the order, rough delivery estimates, the fact that we absolutely DO NOT EVER take credit card payments over the phone etc and, most importantly, that the orders are for COLLECTION ONLY. We are not amazon! 99% of people get this and are TOTALLY cool with it...until this one customer decided to use the email ordering service.

She placed an enquiry about a book via email, we replied, giving her all the info she'd asked for including delivery time, list price etc, asked her to confirm the order and explained that we would place the book on order when we received her confirmation. Normally, this wouldn't have been too much of an issue, but the book in question was £40 hardback and we wanted to be sure they were going to take it! She was still getting off light, if they'd ordered it in store, I'd've made them pay a hefty deposit anyway!

Three days pass, not a word from her, we figure she must have found it cheaper somewhere else. THEN we get a mail from the husband, asking how long he has to wait before his books in?! Oooook...so, we paitiently explain that the order was yet to be confirmed by either him or his wife, and that if he confirmed it, we could place the order that day and have the book in before the end of the week (this was Wednesday last week). He agrees after a rant about how "disorganised and hopeless" we are...

In the gap between him confirming the order and us getting the book (about 2 days) we have AT LEAST 2 emails a day from each of them, usually contradicting eachother. My manager actually told me to stop answering them until the book arrived! Book goes on order and arrives, I leave a phone message (on the number the wife had requested we should notify her on) telling them it's ready for collection.

Today, I got mails from both of them...quelle suprise...one from her saying she'd be in to collect it, and another from him...asking us to post it to the authors office so it can be signed...oh, and he wants to pay for it by card over the phone.

so...when you placed the order on the website, you just...what, thought you'd get around to reading the text clearly telling you the conditions for web ordering later ?!