Good Customer Service Is Priceless (Dolland & Aitchison)

Member Name: shewhoguards

Product:	Dolland & Aitchison
Date:	21/05/08 (190 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great service, helpful but not pushy. Two year guarantee

Disadvantages: Can be costly

I need glasses. Not only that, but I need quite STRONG glasses due to severe astigmatism and quite a weak left eye. This means that I wear them all the time, and as I'm an active person, I don't end up being particularly kind to them.

This week was Glasses Buying Week. Not only was the frame of my old glasses starting to collapse, but my last optician royally mucked up my prescription, resulting in a Desperate Need for new ones. I ended up at Dolland and Aitchison for two reasons. I'd been there in the past and not only was the customer service then good, but the sunglasses I got then (three years ago!) were still looking reasonably decent. Not only that, but they're now offering a two year guarantee, so if I did manage to knacker them they would fix them.

On going in we were greeted fairly quickly by an assistant. I explained that I was hunting for glasses - preferably titanium frames as I'd heard they could be stronger. She helped us hunt, and I noticed that they also had a buy one pair get one pair half price deal on. Excellent!

In the end I picked two frames, one of titanium and one more funky. Without the offer, the titanium frames would have been £59.99 and the "funky" ones £29.99 - apparently they'd recently reduced a whole bunch.

The lenses would have been £140 per pair without the offer, but that is partly because my eyes ARE bad. Getting lenses without the thinning thing is almost unthinkable for me - they'd be huge.

In all of this, I cannot speak highly enough of our assistant. She helped us pick frames, advised us which might look bad with my prescription and was generally helpful without being pushy. When I explained I would need to wait for payday to order and would probably go to the Newcastle branch to do so, she wrote down my frames for me and even advised, unprompted, that I could get an extra voucher to take money off them online taking the cost down to £250 for two pairs.

While still not particularly cheap for two pairs of glasses that will last me for two years it's a price well worth paying. Considering some of the awful treatment I've had at opticians in the past I'm delighted - enough so that I've just emailed corporate to tell them how good she was.

Summary: Well worth the price