Tuesday 2 August 2011

Nails Inc.

Last week, one seemingly fed-up Nails Inc. customer started a bit of a mini-avalanche on their Facebook page in regard to their freight charges. They offer a choice of freight options: free if you spend £50 or more (before freight); Royal Mail at £4.95; or DPD couriers at £5.95.

Nails Inc. customers are already paying £11 per bottle of varnish, which is a lot but the quality is there. However this customer complained that the freight is a lot in addition to the cost of the polishes, which I assume (note: I do not know for certain) do not cost anywhere near that to manufacture.

Various people, commented that they could ship a bottle or two via Royal Mail (including packaging) for a fraction of the freight charge Nails Inc. offer for the same service. I believe this. I use Royal Mail for mailing packages for friends’ birthdays and Christmas at various locations around the UK.

At least twice, Nails Inc. countered this increasing number of complaints with the following statement:

Many thanks to everyone for their comments regarding postage on www.nailsinc.com We are taking these very seriously and will feedback as soon as we can.


Yet still the complaints came. Yesterday, their response to this was:

Thank you again to everyone for the feedback on our postage and packaging. We would like to confirm that we have not increased the cost for delivery – the cost remains at £4.95. We have changed to ‘Royal Mail Tracked’ which is still an excellent recorded delivery service.

Which did not go down well. I decided to enter the fray as well, with a piece of my mind left on Facebook;

You might as well just charge us £5 and come clean that you're shafting your customers.
Why not take the lead from other online retailers such as Amazon who offer a variety of delivery options?
I didn't take advantage of the latest Lucky Dip because your delivery costs seem to be non-negotiable.
You said you would listen to your customers (your source of revenue) but less than a week later you're not doing a thing to help us help you maintain your sales.
I think your polishes are really fantastic but on Friday I went to Boots instead & treated myself to three just-as-lovely No.7 colours instead.


and this post.

Why this post? Because last week during the initial set of complaints, I noticed one user complaining about the poor customer service provided by Nails Inc. I too have been on the receiving end of this, and would like to share it with you. (I have removed the majority of pleasantries for the sake of brevity.)

From: Sarah
Sent: 14 January 2011 11:10
To: customerservice@nailsinc.com; support@nailsinc.com
Subject: Email Address Amendment
Importance: High
I have registered for email newsletters using my personal email address,
personal.email@genericISP.com, this morning, then created an account to place an
order but the system would not accept my personal email address again and I've had to use my work address, work.email@genericcompany.com . I then tried to amend the address in my profile to my personal address which was rejected again on the grounds of duplication.

Please can you arrange for my account profile to be amended so the address is personal.email@genericISP.com.

From: support@nailsinc.com
18/01/2011 15:59
Thank you very much for sending us these details through. I have passed this on to our web team to rectify for you.

From: Sarah
Sent: 11 February 2011 09:17
I am still unable to change my address. Please advise.

From: support@nailsinc.com
15/01/2011 10:28
We have passed you query through to the web team again to see what their progress is with updating your address.
I apologise if this is taking longer than we expected.

From: customerservice@nailsinc.com
23/03/2011 10:17
We apologise for the delay in getting back to you on this.
We were told that this email amendment had been made by our web team but as you say it obviously has not been changed. We have put this case through to them again to resolve and they will come back to us as soon as they can. In the meantime, if you would like to make a phone order with us for any of our products online please give me a call on 0203 405 1451.
Thank you for your patience on this matter and we hope to resolve this soon.

From: Me
01/04/2011 18:25
To whom it may concern.
Further to the below issue which is still not resolved (as originally requested on Friday 14th January 2011) I now have a further problem. This morning I received the latest newsletter and a discount code as my birthday is this month. I appreciate the
discount and already know what I will use it on.
However when I logged into the site this evening, my account no longer shows me as an Ultimate Reward Scheme member (which was purchased on 14th January, order reference [redacted]).
Nor do any of my previous orders* appear in the order history.
As a result my accumulated Ultimate Reward Scheme points are not available to me at
the checkout.
Please can you ensure that my account is rectified as soon as possible, and my missing points returned to me.
*The missing orders are: [redacted for brevity]
I look forward to hearing from you on Monday 4th April.


You may be able to tell from the final email I had lost my temper at this stage. Also there are no further emails as they did not reply on 4th April, I ended up calling them instead to find out what had happened.

This is where it gets silly.

Because my personal email address was already on their files from when I signed up for the newsletter, they transferred all my order history and Ultimate Reward Scheme details over, rather than simply changing the address on my account from my work one to my personal one.

Also, it took from 14th January until 1st April for Nails Inc. to rectify this. The only thing in their favour is their politeness in dealing with me. Yes, they responded to my repeated emails in a timely manner and courteously but I wonder would my problem had been fixed if I had not persisted in chasing it. I never got an email from them which was unprompted by me.