Zavvi’s Threatening Letters And The Importance Of Customer Service

It’s been an odd year for the UK’s big games retailers. There’s the ongoing issue of digital sales stealing the share from bricks-and-mortar retailers and the general state of the UK economy meaning that the entertainment business is struggling to stretch its ends to meet. But the new console launches from Sony and Microsoft, coupled with a really strong year for Nintendo’s software, has meant that there’s an air of excitement around games retail too.

Game, re-emerging from their administration, have been appearing to do quite well but troubles around console preorders have had their customer service staff working overtime, while the stores themselves pretend that the only way they could possibly sell you a PS4 or Xbox One console is if you buy some high-margin games and Blu-rays along with it.

CEX, who have quite the history of price-gouging amid launch sell-outs, tried to court some positive publicity by giving a free console to an idiot who was duped into paying £450 for a photograph by an eBay scam artist. It might have been intended as a publicity stunt but it appeared to be rewarding the astonishing stupidity of someone who had seen little sympathy from the gaming community.

ShopTo had several separate customer service disasters in which they insulted, admonished and alienated their customers via email and social media, cancelled preorders and generally demonstrated how not to use twitter, before taking PS4 preorder funds surprisingly early and without warning and then throwing in a healthy smattering of public apologies every time they embarrassed themselves.

Blockbuster slipped back into administration and is in the process of looking for a buyer as the company unfortunately has to make large numbers of staff unemployed just before Christmas.

Amazon have enough spare cash that they can throw it into pie-in-the-sky, Tom Clancy-esque, schemes like a drone delivery service, but they can’t smoothly sell a launch allocation of PlayStation 4 consoles without some mistakes leading to unfulfilled orders. They also run their distribution centres where “despair leaks around the edges”, if a recent journalistic infiltration is to be believed.

Now we see today’s news that, in the wake of an embarrassingly idiotic mistake, Zavvi is threatening customers with legal action. In the letter, which was sent to customers who had been delivered an unexpected Vita in with their preorder of Tearaway, they issued a deadline of 5PM today for customers to contact them if they received the £169.99 bundle in place of their £19.99 preorder.

So, in response to their own stupid mistake, they decided to make very dubious legal threats against customers. Customers who may be emboldened by the Distance Selling Regulations that talk of unsolicited goods being treated as unconditional gifts. Customers with access to Twitter and Facebook and any amount of internet forums and amateur legal advisors. What could possibly go wrong?

I’m not qualified to comment on the legality of demanding that customers return the Vita they received in error. I wouldn’t want to – as many others doubtlessly will – give advice that could ultimately be incorrect and result in an individual getting into legal difficulties with the lawyers at Zavvi. However, I think that, by virtue of being a largely compassionate (I hope) human being, I’m perfectly qualified to comment on the letter Zavvi (operated by TheHut.com, who can boast significant profits. And they do.) sent to customers.

It’s not simply another customer service debacle from a company so wrought with fear at its position desperately close to the economic danger zone that it needs to claw back every penny it can from its own episodes of rank incompetence. If that were so, we could laugh it off and roll our eyes and loudly tut at their idiocy before moving on to a few weeks respite before the next exciting instalment of “big retailer doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing.”

No, the Zavvi letter is nasty. It’s the legalese equivalent of “if you don’t pay me back that tenner I dropped in your garden last week, I’m going to break your legs.”

These letters are arriving with customers a couple of weeks before Christmas and they make vague legal threats without anything to back them up or any specific allegation of wrongdoing. Zavvi appears to be hoping that, in the absence of any practical ability to reclaim goods, a nice old-fashioned bit of fear mongering will do.

Regardless of the rights and wrongs – legal or moral – of customers keeping goods that they know they’re not supposed to have, the mistake was Zavvi’s. Threatening “any and/or all legal remedies available to [them],” will doubtless panic some into compliance but it’s not a pleasant tactic. It doesn’t make Zavvi appear to be a company I’d like to do business with – even if I could ignore the simple fact that they were incapable of successfully and accurately fulfilling an order.

It’s difficult to have sympathy for a company that so quickly turns to these kind of nasty missives. So in a few weeks, when our finger hovers over that order button, we’ll remember this. And in a few months or a few years, if we see stories of Zavvi’s impending administration (again), we’ll remember this. But it will be hard to remember that there are people who work there that will be in danger of losing their jobs. People who do a good job and try hard.

Should they hit on hard times, we’ll remember Zavvi not as a collection of people trying hard to fulfil their promises to customers but as the company who couldn’t run their business properly and had a bit of a legal tantrum when it didn’t get its toys back. And we’ll struggle to care if the company lives or dies.

Thanks, DarkZero