http://www.burtsbees.ca
http://www.burtsbees.com

So I started buying Burts Bee’s products recently, & I was considering getting their skin care line, but they didn’t seem to have a selection for different types of skin types, so I decided to call them.

BIG MISTAKE

First I went to their website & there was NO PHONE NUMBER. I absolutely hate it when a large company has no phone number. The message I get from that IS… we don’t care about you, we want to make you suffer by making you e-mail us so that your question is not answered in a quick & easy manner.

We all know that e-mail takes longer, I haven’t come across one company yet that can respond back to an e-mail query within a few hours. I’m sometimes the exception because I’ll respond right away if I’m at my computer, & usually the potential client or existing client is slow to then respond back to me.

Anyway, I accepted the fact that I was about to be forced into filling out their online contact form & “tried” to fill it out.

Now I’m in Canada, so I was forced into using their Canadian form & of course Canada being one of THE worst countries when it comes to businesses not knowing how to use the Internet properly, the form wouldn’t work. One of their questions didn’t have any content in their drop down menu & so the form kept tellling me to pick something, but there was nothing to pick.

20 minutes later I was getting more frustrated & angry by the minute.

In my opinion, it should take all of 2 minutes to go to a site, find the contact page & type your question. Anything longer is a waste of the consumer’s precious time, & shows that the company doesn’t know what they are doing.

I could have handled 5 minutes, but it wasn’t 5 minutes, because now I had to try to find a way to solve the problem that Burts Bee was having on THEIR website.

Anyway, I found their US site & their form was working fine, so I filled it out on 04-14-09.

By 04-21-09 no response, so I did it again, filled it out. My respect for this company had dropped the minute I had problems on their site & they had no phone number, but I am a fair person, had they responded to my query, I would have overlooked that, but now with no response, I was getting angrier.

This time I got a response 3 days later & of course I hear “we never received your first e-mail.” plus it took them 3 days to get back to me. That’s just too long.

Well guess what, it’s clear they have problems with their sites. Could be the website coding, could be the flash in the middle of the page, I couldn’t hazard a guess.

Not to discard issues with e-mails, we all have them, but if you had a phone number on your site, you would eliminate a lot of problems, & I did receive 2 “thank you” notices, so clearly the form did work both times.

Melanie did apologize which was nice, but she wanted me to respond to the e-mail & I was like, no way was I going to do that & I was still left wondering “why don’t they want me to call them?”

Anyway, their phone number is underneath her name, & somehow they knew to give me the Canadian phone number to Burts Bees, not the American one.  Still have no idea how they knew that, but anyway, I call & guess what…

LOL, no one at customer service picks up the phone, so I have to leave a message on their voicemail system. This was on 05-01-09.

Do you think I got a call back??????

Of course not, why would a company who’s selling products to the public want to call a customer back? I mean that would mean that they know how to run their business would it not?

I called again on 05-04-09, same thing, they don’t have people there manning the phones, it’s just a voice mail system. I leave a message again.

It’s now 05-08-09 & no call back.

Well Burts Bees, I gave you many chances to show you are a professional company & you failed on 4 counts.

This warrants you being put on this blog so others can read what happened.

They lost the sale from me, because now I’m going to go with another skin care line & my son went with another line too.

Michelle