Terrible customer service & lack of elementary politeness.
On June 26, my wife and I drove from Antwerp to Düsseldorf for some shopping. A vast stop has been FRANZEN (so did our family generation before us). We ended up at 17:15 in the shop.
This time it proved to be our last one as this shop is not what it used to be anymore. The sparkle of this shop is gone. The very bad service and old collections are to blame. The carelessness of the owner (the son of the house) and the lack of customer service is obvious.
Most of the staff has lost its sparkle as well. The old generation of staff has clearly no passion and does not seem to understand what their upscale shoppers expect: good service.
The lady at the Baccarat corner seemed busy on her computer and therefor "forgot" to answer friendly shouting "moment" in German where it should have been "moment PLEASE".
A young -well dressed- friendly staff fortunately quickly served us and informed us about Christofle's latest arrivals.
My Japanese wife and I quickly decided and bought some Hermès tableware for our new office.
At the cash desk everything went wrong when I asked to be registered as an international company... The old staff had difficulties in registering our new company, but we could place this as 'not everybody is good at IT'. This lady sold us some of the products, so nothing bad about her.
However, I cannot tell anything good about the cash desk boy -dressed as a tourist in jeans and a t-shirt- and with an attitude that does not fit a shop that wants to position itself as a "luxury store"...
An elderly lady next to us could not hear how much she had to pay for her candles. The boy shouted "32 EURO" without a decent "PLEASE".
The boy scanned our tickets after we finally had a new client number. The price ended up over 1850 EUR which made me surprised, as Retail Experts, my spouse and me were well aware how much the total had to be... I friendly asked "how do you get to this amount, could you say what you have scanned...". I immediately was answered impolitely "I cannot see it, I have just thrown away your tickets... first you need to pay and then we can see...".
So I paid and was sent to his (friendly) colleague next to him. She quickly noticed the boy had made a mistake.
The owner was the whole time behind the desk and just watched the scene... He was more busy in ringing the bell via the intercom to announce the clients had to get out as soon as possible because it was 6PM... Not the service you would expect in a shop that tries to target a "wealthy clientele". One would expect a friendly announcement saying "Dear Customers we are almost closing, we invite you to our cash desks and are looking forward to seeing you again...". No, at Franzen you get an ordinary ring tone via intercom trying to chase out clients because it is Saturday 6 PM and we want to go home! Forget about Customer Service! "Get out of here, the sooner the better..."
When the staff noticed the cash desk boy's mistake, I immediately addressed myself to the owner asking him if this was his idea of "Customer Service"? I knew that the bill was wrong, but was refused help. Instead I had to pay first and was only helped then...". Furthermore the way the cash desk employee answered was wrong, rude and clearly a sign that he did not want to work longer as it was 7 minutes after 6PM!
The owner clearly did not inherit his parents' customer friendliness that we could experience long time ago. It is not because you wear an Hermès belt, that you know how to treat clients that are experienced luxury shoppers!
The owner was not keen on expressing their regret for making a mistake and clearly could not handle us criticizing his lack of service and the bad customer service!
Finally the boy refunded our money on our credit card, scanned the products a second time and let us pay for a second time. During this process the boy was sighing the whole time: again an example of extremely bad customer service. The owner was standing next to him and said in German "calm down"...Very professional Mr. Franzen!
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