Friday, October 29, 2010

Empire Today, Follow Up

As a quick follow up to my blog post last night about our horrible experience with Empire Today, I wanted to post real quick that I just received a call from Empire Today. The woman, Rebecca, said she had read my blog post from last night and was calling to apologize.

I think it's great that Empire Today is using the growing technology for their benefit in terms of connecting with their customers.

While it does not make up for the rude woman we had to deal with twice from their company (last week and the week before), I do appreciate a company owning up to what happened, taking responsibility, apologizing and promising to take an internal look into what happened. How refreshing!

As I mentioned last night, we got our carpet installed through Empire Today earlier and we had absolutely no problems. The guy was informative and friendly and everything happened pretty smoothly.

I've always thought that if  you aren't a people's person and friendly, you are in the wrong business if you are in retail/sales (or anything similar). I've worked in retail in the past alongside school, so I've seen both sides of it -- and I can't say it enough -- the way you interact with your customers makes a HUGE difference.

I'm never this quick to blog anymore, but I didn't want to leave it hanging - because I do appreciate Rebecca calling to apologize. Companies lately seem to forget that without their customers, they are nothing.

 P.S. Don't forget to leave me a comment below on your thoughts! As always, I'd love to hear from you.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just came across your entry (this in follow-up to your bad experience with Empire, I read both) because there's an Empire salesperson at this moment writing up a bid for me in my kitchen. I'm just looking around for other people's reviews of their work, especially versus Budget Blinds' work. By now you've probably had the new blinds done by BB. Any comments on that experience? I'll get bids from both places for sure. Bummer about the lousy Empire sales rep! This one seems knowledgable and definitely has good people skills.

Summaiyah Hyder said...

We did end up getting the blinds through Budget Blinds and were happy with the service we received as well as the blinds themselves.

They come to your house so its easy to match what colors work best in the room, etc. Like I said in the blog post, we had carpet installed through Empire Today with no problems but the blinds aspect was a total another story.

I would advise you to get a quote from both places because you might like the items that only one or the other offers. I know some of the products we liked were only offered by Budget Blinds for example.

I've always said and believed that the sales rep for the company can make the difference with who the consumer chooses to work with so I'm glad yours is good.

Anonymous said...

I went ahead with Budget Blinds in the end! I liked the presentation better, the much wider selection of blinds, and DEFINITELY the more comfortable sales pitch. The Empire rep had been a real estate agent and pushed me to "invest" in my home for resale down the road and the BB rep took into greater consideration our lifestyle and true needs (even steered me away from add-ons I didn't need that Empire insisted I did). I also feel much better about keeping such a huge chunk of change in my community, in my neighborhood in fact. BB is owned by someone active in community charities and service projects. Empire is who knows where and the rep getting her hefty cut doesn't live close by. Luckily BB came in with a better price and product because after my research I would have wanted to go with them anyway. I'm glad they made it easier for me.

Thanks again for your reflections!

Summaiyah Hyder said...

No problem! I hope you have a good experience with Budget Blinds like we did - I completely agree with your analysis. It's always nice to get a chance to work with someone who actually cares about your lifestyle (very hard to come by nowadays). We told ours what we wanted, and they showed us several products that were suitable for our needs so we didn't have to waste time looking through useless things that we wouldn't even consider.

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