[Very] Long Vent: Terrible Customer Service at Voltaire

[anev]

:mad:
I should preface the following emails with a little background:

I believe if you treat customers with such disrespect you should have to “wear it” so-to-speak so I am publishing our correspondence here because I feel that if others want to purchase anything through Voltaire, even something so lowly as a baseball cap, they should be aware of the type of person may have to deal with in customer relations.

I have been coveting a Voltaire baseball cap since I saw one at Devon last spring but figured I would buy one come May when I go back to Devon. My boyfriend, being very sweet, decided to surprise me on Valentine’s Day with the cap. I love hats. I wear baseball caps at least once a day - taking the dog out, running errands, leaving the barn with hat hair, lazy days that I don’t feel like doing my hair, etc - so I have a small collection of them from all my favorite places and brands.

When the cap arrived at my house (boyfriend and I are long distance for the time being) and I opened the box was really disappointed. The shape of the hat was Elmer Fudd meets ironic Trucker hat and the color was a very different brown than the hat I saw at Devon. Most markedly, the adjustment at the back of the hat was their “signature” blue stripes on grosgrain ribbon which meant when I went to put it on my head, the adjustment slipped open and it was automatically too big.
Side note: There were TWO hats in the box instead of one.

I called Boyfriend so he could get his money back and we could return the hats. A little while later he called to tell me that he called Voltaire but got a machine so he would call back Monday.

I’ll admit that I wrote a less-than-friendly email to them that Sunday when I rediscovered the hats in my foyer and got reignited. That email read:
"Hi!

My boyfriend bought me one of your hats for Valentine’s Day - I had seen it at a horse show and thought it was very cute - but the hat(s) you shipped me are very poor quality and a very unattractive brown color. Also, I received two. I don’t know if the thought was to send two poor quality hats for the price of one good quality hat but I would expect a company whose reputation hinges on craftsmanship to pay attention to the quality of all its goods, not just the expensive ones. There was no receipt in the box nor return shipping label so I would like to know how to give these back to you.

Best,
A**"

I know, I know I’m an as*hole and should not have been so harsh but the message I received the following morning floored me. Again, the email read:

"Dear A*****,

Thank you for your very nice message, very pleasant at 10 pm on Sunday night. We appreciate it.
Generally, when a customer request a refund for a product, they can do it in a professional way, not by insulting us, our products and our reputation. You know, a sentence like this one would be more appreciated “I do not like the hats I received, How can I return them and get refunded, Thank you”

We have been successfully marketing and selling the same hat for four years and our customers love it. I can understand if you do not, but I cannot accept your insulting message just by respect for our employees. I am sorry.
If you do not like the color, this is our brand color and we never produced any other color. If you expected a yellow one or a green one, you had to buy from another brand. All our hats are the same Chocolate color.
You received two hats because our company is dedicated to customer service and we understood it was a Valentine’s gift. We wanted to be nice to you and offer you a second one for free for your boyfriend to match during Valentine’s day, but it looks like you do not appreciate anything.
I am sorry, I would love to receive two pieces from a company when I order only one.
So enclosed please a find a prepaid UPS label to ship back our products and when we receive them, we will issue a full refund to your credit card.

Thank you and have a beautiful day

–
C**** M***
Voltaire Design Inc."

Now, I realize my initial email was a bit harsh but my intention was to let this company know that the product this customer received was not up to par with expectations so they could either a.) lie and tell me they were addressing the quality issue or b.) actually address the quality issue. My big mouth had to send a reply but it was my last:

"Dear C****,

I apologize if you found my message insulting. Upon re-reading it, I do not see what was unprofessional about it but… to each their own. However, if this is the same hat that you have been marketing for four years than the hat I have seen in person must have been older. Your website shows a hat that looks very similar to the hat I saw in person but the photograph on your website is so small it is possible I am mistaken.

I, at no point in my message, insulted you as an individual, a company, or your reputation. I did, however, state my surprise at the poor quality of the hats considering what your business is. Quality. I do appreciate many, many things. Quality happens to be one of those things and had the merchandise been worth wearing I may have a different perspective towards your “gift” of customer service but, alas, I do not.
If this is the kind of email you send to your customers, you can count me out of that crowd.

As I’m sure you are well aware, your reputation as a company does teeter between terrible and terrific. As a young company, people like me are not good for business.

Best,
A*****"

At this point I was FURIOUS and am still more than a little upset by the way Voltaire handles its customers. Wasn’t part of the problem at Devoucoux, the sellier these employees left, the customer relations department, and the one of their aims to improve in that area because Devoucoux is so notorious? Well, it only got more insulting. Here are the final two emails that I received from Mr. Mode:

"Dear A*****,

The picture on our website and the one I sent you is the same hat. Chocolate with the embroidery logo.
I do not understand what you call poor quality for this hats, it is $20 and I have seen many thousand of hats for $35.00 or $50 from other companies that are the same.
Unfortunately, in the USA, there are no more factory that makes hats so all of them are made in China.
Our hats are fine, what do you mean by poor quality for this $20 hat.

I am sorry if you found my email a little bit too much but your message was not a regular message to ask for a refund. Poor quality, two piece of poor quality instead of one nice hat, unattractive brown color. Why not stay nice and just ask for a refund?

I am sending nice emails to all my customers, the ones who buy a saddle, as well as the ones who buy a jar of grease, I also stay nice with customers who do not like our products and ask for a refund. For me each customer is important and we try to offer a very good customer service as you can read everywhere on forums. You cannot satisfy everybody unfortunately so it happens that a customer ask for a refund. We issue the refund and we stay friends with them. Some customers got refunded last year and bought a saddle this year because they were very satisfied by our customer service. They do not send us a message regarding the poor quality of the product, of the color, of the customer service, etc…

I never said that people like you are not good for business but I said that you can ask for a refund in a nice way. life is better if we respect each other.

I bought a dress to my wife at Macy for Valentine’s day, she did not like it, she went to the store and ask for a refund, she did not tell them that the dress was a poor quality, the color was bad and their company bad.

So, I understood you do not like the poor quality of the $20 hat you received, you do not like the brown color and you will not be our customer anymore. Fine, I sent you a return label, I just refunded your boyfriend (enclosed please find the refund receipt) so let me know if there is something else I can do.

Thank you."

-and-

"Dear A*****,

This will be my last email to you as I do not want you or me to spend more time on this matter.
Please accept my apologies if you think that my first email was wrong. I am sorry again, I felt offended for my employees, for the company and I though it was not fair to read your first message this message. I can promise you that we make good products every day (except the hats according to you) every day in a nice factory in France, people are working hard and we do at the office to try to satisfy our customers.
So if you feel that I was wrong by responding to you, I want to apologize again to you.
If you want to keep the hats that I sent you, you can keep them also, I already refunded your boyfriend credit card first thing this morning.

At the end, I just want you to be happy.
Have a beautiful day"

It seems to me that the second-to-last email was written by a different author because the English is so broken but, as they are both signed by the same person, I must do nothing but assume they are all written by the same person.

I have so many issues with these emails I hardly know where to begin. Boyfriend called me later in the afternoon to tell me he had spoken to the gentleman who had cursed at him and claimed I had insulted the quality of all of the company’s wares. Clearly, I did no such thing. I do, however, have a few comments:

1. If you GOOGLE “American hat manufacturing” or any combination of words that reference hats being manufactured in the United States, there are at least a thousand hits. Do not tell me that there are no hat manufactures in the US and that all hats have to be made in China.
2. I do not care how much the hat cost. I have received hats for free that were better quality than these.
3. I have already addressed that I was telling the company about the poor quality of these hats because I knew they were not made in your French workshop and I would not be offending your craftsman. I was, possibly, insulting your company’s choice in hat manufacturer.
4. Hats are a walking advertisement for your company - Sell ugly hats and no one is going to pay you to promote your company. I find it very hard to believe that your customers “love” these hats. They are not flattering.
5. This isn’t about the hats. They are just hats, I don’t care what the price range is, they don’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. However, telling the customer they are wrong, being condescending and rude, and cursing on the telephone are completely inappropriate and unprofessional.

I will never buy a thing from Voltaire (yes, all based on a stupid hat) and I will encourage anyone I am affiliated with to find an alternative to any product of theirs.

[toady123]

Wowza!!! While I agree that your first e-mail was pretty rude, that kind of response from a professional company is just not appropriate. I barely have words - just shocking!!

[NurseHorsey]

I don’t think that your first email was that rude at all, honestly. You politely requested a refund and explained why you were displeased with the product in honest (but not with a snide, rude, obnoxious, offended, ect. tone) and open way. I am very familiar with customer service and if I were a business owner or associate for the company, I would be disappointed that a customer was so dissatisfied and attempt to reconcile the issues.

I would certainly not respond with the exceptionally unprofessional and frankly juvenile email that you received. The tone and words used are offensive in and of themselves, without the further emails or phone call to add to them.

While I do admire Voltaire products, that type of “customer service” makes me very hesitant to ever purchase anything from them just in case I had to return or exchange it.

[katarine]

you acted like a cow.

You really did.

They shipped you TWO for the price of one.

Then you behaved badly because you had a sad. Poor, poor you.

They will not miss you. Some money costs too much.

[Coanteen]

I think the first email from OP was snippy and unnecessarily so in tone, but should be par for the course for a company dealing with customers who are sometimes dissatisfied.

The responses from the company are hair-raising. And right off the bat, a comment about “very pleasant at 10 pm on Sunday night”??? IT’S EMAIL, YOU DUMBOID! I will email any time I damn well please, and if you don’t like dealing with customers at 10pm on Sunday night, DON’T FRUITBATTING CHECK YOUR FRUITBATTING WORK EMAIL AT 10 PM ON SUNDAY NIGHT!

Seriously was ready to throw stuff at him after that sentence, and he hasn’t even started insulting OP yet.

[Ghazzu]

Talk about “First World” problems…

[dani0303]

Wow. I agree that the original email was snippy but I agree with the poster who said that it should be par for the course for a company dealing in customer service.

The response is just mind boggling. I cannot believe that the owner(?) of the company said that. He could have lost out on $$,$$$ from the OP and her friends because of that. That response would definitely make me think twice about purchasing a VERY expensive saddle from them.

[GoForAGallop]

[QUOTE=anev;7438888]
:mad:
I should preface the following emails with a little background:

I believe if you treat customers with such disrespect you should have to “wear it” so-to-speak so I am publishing our correspondence here because I feel that if others want to purchase anything through Voltaire, even something so lowly as a baseball cap, they should be aware of the type of person may have to deal with in customer relations.

I have been coveting a Voltaire baseball cap since I saw one at Devon last spring but figured I would buy one come May when I go back to Devon. My boyfriend, being very sweet, decided to surprise me on Valentine’s Day with the cap. I love hats. I wear baseball caps at least once a day - taking the dog out, running errands, leaving the barn with hat hair, lazy days that I don’t feel like doing my hair, etc - so I have a small collection of them from all my favorite places and brands.

When the cap arrived at my house (boyfriend and I are long distance for the time being) and I opened the box was really disappointed. The shape of the hat was Elmer Fudd meets ironic Trucker hat and the color was a very different brown than the hat I saw at Devon. Most markedly, the adjustment at the back of the hat was their “signature” blue stripes on grosgrain ribbon which meant when I went to put it on my head, the adjustment slipped open and it was automatically too big.
Side note: There were TWO hats in the box instead of one.

I called Boyfriend so he could get his money back and we could return the hats. A little while later he called to tell me that he called Voltaire but got a machine so he would call back Monday.

I’ll admit that I wrote a less-than-friendly email to them that Sunday when I rediscovered the hats in my foyer and got reignited. That email read:
"Hi!

My boyfriend bought me one of your hats for Valentine’s Day - I had seen it at a horse show and thought it was very cute - but the hat(s) you shipped me are very poor quality and a very unattractive brown color. Also, I received two. I don’t know if the thought was to send two poor quality hats for the price of one good quality hat but I would expect a company whose reputation hinges on craftsmanship to pay attention to the quality of all its goods, not just the expensive ones. There was no receipt in the box nor return shipping label so I would like to know how to give these back to you.

Best,
A**"

I know, I know I’m an as*hole and should not have been so harsh but the message I received the following morning floored me. Again, the email read:

"Dear A*****,

Thank you for your very nice message, very pleasant at 10 pm on Sunday night. We appreciate it.
Generally, when a customer request a refund for a product, they can do it in a professional way, not by insulting us, our products and our reputation. You know, a sentence like this one would be more appreciated “I do not like the hats I received, How can I return them and get refunded, Thank you”

We have been successfully marketing and selling the same hat for four years and our customers love it. I can understand if you do not, but I cannot accept your insulting message just by respect for our employees. I am sorry.
If you do not like the color, this is our brand color and we never produced any other color. If you expected a yellow one or a green one, you had to buy from another brand. All our hats are the same Chocolate color.
You received two hats because our company is dedicated to customer service and we understood it was a Valentine’s gift. We wanted to be nice to you and offer you a second one for free for your boyfriend to match during Valentine’s day, but it looks like you do not appreciate anything.
I am sorry, I would love to receive two pieces from a company when I order only one.
So enclosed please a find a prepaid UPS label to ship back our products and when we receive them, we will issue a full refund to your credit card.

Thank you and have a beautiful day

–

Voltaire Design Inc."

Now, I realize my initial email was a bit harsh but my intention was to let this company know that the product this customer received was not up to par with expectations so they could either a.) lie and tell me they were addressing the quality issue or b.) actually address the quality issue. My big mouth had to send a reply but it was my last:

"Dear C,

I apologize if you found my message insulting. Upon re-reading it, I do not see what was unprofessional about it but… to each their own. However, if this is the same hat that you have been marketing for four years than the hat I have seen in person must have been older. Your website shows a hat that looks very similar to the hat I saw in person but the photograph on your website is so small it is possible I am mistaken.

I, at no point in my message, insulted you as an individual, a company, or your reputation. I did, however, state my surprise at the poor quality of the hats considering what your business is. Quality. I do appreciate many, many things. Quality happens to be one of those things and had the merchandise been worth wearing I may have a different perspective towards your “gift” of customer service but, alas, I do not.
If this is the kind of email you send to your customers, you can count me out of that crowd.

As I’m sure you are well aware, your reputation as a company does teeter between terrible and terrific. As a young company, people like me are not good for business.

Best,
A*****"

At this point I was FURIOUS and am still more than a little upset by the way Voltaire handles its customers. Wasn’t part of the problem at Devoucoux, the sellier these employees left, the customer relations department, and the one of their aims to improve in that area because Devoucoux is so notorious? Well, it only got more insulting. Here are the final two emails that I received from Mr. Mode:

"Dear A*****,

The picture on our website and the one I sent you is the same hat. Chocolate with the embroidery logo.
I do not understand what you call poor quality for this hats, it is $20 and I have seen many thousand of hats for $35.00 or $50 from other companies that are the same.
Unfortunately, in the USA, there are no more factory that makes hats so all of them are made in China.
Our hats are fine, what do you mean by poor quality for this $20 hat.

I am sorry if you found my email a little bit too much but your message was not a regular message to ask for a refund. Poor quality, two piece of poor quality instead of one nice hat, unattractive brown color. Why not stay nice and just ask for a refund?

I am sending nice emails to all my customers, the ones who buy a saddle, as well as the ones who buy a jar of grease, I also stay nice with customers who do not like our products and ask for a refund. For me each customer is important and we try to offer a very good customer service as you can read everywhere on forums. You cannot satisfy everybody unfortunately so it happens that a customer ask for a refund. We issue the refund and we stay friends with them. Some customers got refunded last year and bought a saddle this year because they were very satisfied by our customer service. They do not send us a message regarding the poor quality of the product, of the color, of the customer service, etc…

I never said that people like you are not good for business but I said that you can ask for a refund in a nice way. life is better if we respect each other.

I bought a dress to my wife at Macy for Valentine’s day, she did not like it, she went to the store and ask for a refund, she did not tell them that the dress was a poor quality, the color was bad and their company bad.

So, I understood you do not like the poor quality of the $20 hat you received, you do not like the brown color and you will not be our customer anymore. Fine, I sent you a return label, I just refunded your boyfriend (enclosed please find the refund receipt) so let me know if there is something else I can do.

Thank you."

-and-

"Dear A*****,

This will be my last email to you as I do not want you or me to spend more time on this matter.
Please accept my apologies if you think that my first email was wrong. I am sorry again, I felt offended for my employees, for the company and I though it was not fair to read your first message this message. I can promise you that we make good products every day (except the hats according to you) every day in a nice factory in France, people are working hard and we do at the office to try to satisfy our customers.
So if you feel that I was wrong by responding to you, I want to apologize again to you.
If you want to keep the hats that I sent you, you can keep them also, I already refunded your boyfriend credit card first thing this morning.

At the end, I just want you to be happy.
Have a beautiful day"

It seems to me that the second-to-last email was written by a different author because the English is so broken but, as they are both signed Claude Mode, I must do nothing but assume they are all written by the same person.

I have so many issues with these emails I hardly know where to begin. Boyfriend called me later in the afternoon to tell me he had spoken to Mr.Mode who had cursed at him and claimed I had insulted the quality of all of the company’s wares. Clearly, I did no such thing. I do, however, have a few comments:

1. If you GOOGLE “American hat manufacturing” or any combination of words that reference hats being manufactured in the United States, there are at least a thousand hits. Do not tell me that there are no hat manufactures in the US and that all hats have to be made in China.
2. I do not care how much the hat cost. I have received hats for free that were better quality than these.
3. I have already addressed that I was telling the company about the poor quality of these hats because I knew they were not made in your French workshop and I would not be offending your craftsman. I was, possibly, insulting your company’s choice in hat manufacturer.
4. Hats are a walking advertisement for your company - Sell ugly hats and no one is going to pay you to promote your company. I find it very hard to believe that your customers “love” these hats. They are not flattering.
5. This isn’t about the hats. They are just hats, I don’t care what the price range is, they don’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. However, telling the customer they are wrong, being condescending and rude, and cursing on the telephone are completely inappropriate and unprofessional.

I will never buy a thing from Voltaire (yes, all based on a stupid hat) and I will encourage anyone I am affiliated with to find an alternative to any product of theirs.[/QUOTE]

Full quote, for preservation reasons.

Personally, I am in customer service and your snippy, nasty initial email (honey over vinegar, honey over vinegar) is not the worst that I’ve seen. Yes, his emails are equally unprofessional, but clearly he felt very passionately about defending his company, and he DID apologize for his hasty reply.

That said, I’m not sure someone complaining about a $20 hat is someone who is going to be forking up $4k for one of his saddles anytime soon, so I guess he took a gamble on that one.

[MaybeMorgan]

Your first email was unnecessarily rude.
You also never gave them any real understanding of your dissatisfaction besides a very vague “poor quality” which seems to have lead to a lot of miscommunication.

Sounded like vino on both sides to me.

[anev]

Fine, I’m a cow. Had it been a saddle? Would I still be a cow? Would my “having a sad” been more deserved? I admit I was ripe but even had I told that man to go fondle his mother his response should never have been what it was. Good customer service means the customer is always right… even if it is just for the 5 seconds it takes you to write the email.

[Coanteen]

[QUOTE=anev;7439018]
Good customer service means the customer is always right… [/QUOTE]

No.

Nonononononononono.

NO.

Good customer service means you remain professionally courteous to the customer. “The customer is always right” is the cry of the entitled, who are almost always wrong. And cows.

[katarine]

It’s good to see you acknowledge your error.the moo fits…wear it

[anev]

Well, I’m not sure where you got your customer service training but at Xerox (who have been known globally for their training and have sold their training methods to other companies) “The customer is always right” is one of their things. Is it fact? Hell no. But it seems to work as a starting place for a longterm relationship with customers. In this particular case, would it have hurt anyone for his response to have been “Sorry you feel that way. Here is the return sticker. We’ll assess the situation internally.” No. Just as it wouldn’t have hurt for me to tell him in a simpler fashion that I was unsatisfied. I get it.
Now, I have admitted repeatedly that I was overboard in my message and, apparently, that matters far more than the complete disrespect from the other side.
I am, actually, looking at several pieces of tack so yes, this as*hole who is complaining about the $20 hat is about to fork over a pretty penny so yes, this matters… even if only to me.
I am hoping that if someone else out there is looking in to buying from them, they benefit from knowing the possibilities of dealing with a Devoucoux Part Deux.

[arabhorse2]

Pretty obvious you’ve never had the dubious ‘pleasure’ of working retail, OP.

Your self absorbed, entitled attitude is par for the course with people who have absolutely no clue what it’s like to have to deal with multiples of you on a daily basis.

You had no reason to be [so] snotty [edit] right out of the starting gate other than some incorrect, preconceived notion that you can be a flaming [edit] all you want and they just have to take it. Over something as inconsequential as a ballcap, no less.

There are many, many, many times the customer ISN’T right, and this was one of those times.

[UlysMom]

This is over a baseball hat, right? Ok…

ETA: I worked for the biggest customer service oriented business in the world for 7 years. I had pixie dust blown up my backside and attended “University” classes taught by costumer service nazis. I understand the expectation of solid, ‘the costumer is always right regardless if they are a first class a-hole service’. And I’m disappointed when I can’t get a basic thank you with eye contact from a retail associate. But that doesn’t mean I ever turn into that first class a-hole because I know what good service SHOULD be. Because that just reflects poorly on me.

Sorry you didn’t like your hat.

[Coanteen]

[QUOTE=anev;7439065]
Well, I’m not sure where you got your customer service training but at Xerox (who have been known globally for their training and have sold their training methods to other companies) “The customer is always right” is one of their things. Is it fact? Hell no. [/QUOTE]

Exactly. It’s not fact, it’s just a quick slogan, a way to boil down the idea of respecting the customer and taking their concerns seriously. I don’t mind if a service provider uses it as part of their training.

But when an angry customer starts going on about “being always right,” it always, always reeks of entitlement.

[katarine]

If only this was a fully transparent discussion, and both parties were named. You enjoy the benefit of hiding behind a handle while anonymously trashing a company and sharing emails.

You really just don’t get it that you ‘look bad’, too? Would you like to share your real name and stand behind your outrage? I rather doubt it.

[DancingArabian]

So…are you returning the hats?

[SnicklefritzG]

I hate to say this OP, but I think you asked for it. Maybe not as much as you got, but in some cultures there are things you just don’t do.

I think you should do the right thing and return the hats if your BF got his $ refunded on his card.

[anev]

You’re right. I’m not posting my name. I do understand that I look bad. I have said it repeatedly. I have also worked in the service industry, so blown hypothesis there. The difference is that I don’t currently and I am not a company or representative of one. I am not in charge of people or merchandise, or potentially the well-being of their horse in the case of saddles. And entitled… you’re talking about the most “entitled” industry possible, maybe second to yachting, and these people can’t handle it?

Yes, I am returning the hats. It does me no good to have two things I can’t use and I wouldn’t give away.