Buyer receives (shock!) good customer service twice at local Currys' branch (Currys)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Currys
Date:	19/09/09 (71 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: There are Currys branches everywhere and they sell a good range of stuff

Disadvantages: Some branches appear to be staffed by quite disinterested people

Touching wood, considering the mostly scathing reviews that Currys eletrical shop has earned itself from others on this site, I'd tentatively say that I don't find them too bad, actually.

What prompted me to write this review is that Currys recently came out near the bottom of a (I think) 'Which'-magazine-sponsored survey, in terms of the quality of its customer service for people wanting to buy a new computer. We recently bought a laptop there and we pleasantly surprised to have been met by courteous, apparently well-informed and helpful staff (and these were two different members of well-informed and helpful staff) both during our 'fact finding' and subsequent computer-purchasing trips. The first person told us what all those mystifying Hz numbers meant, together with which were important and which weren't for the uses we had planned for the new computer, and recommended a number of models. The second Curry's assistant recapped what the first one had said, then very patiently waited while we dithered for quite some time over our narrowed-down choice of two computers (although he did seem peculiarly keen - and for no obvious reason - to advise us to pick the Dell machine). While he was keen for us to take up the various extras offered with the machine (eg discount virus checker software etc.) but wasn't too pushy about this and appeared, in a very unsalesman-like manner, to respect our final decision.

I'm used, when at computer shops, to being completely ignored by all the staff - presumably because neither am I a man, nor do I look like someone who could be persuaded into purchasing an £800 giant LCD flat-screen monitor or some such - so all this actual and attentive customer service made a nice change for me at any rate.

Of course it's not all plain-sailing with Currys. The big retail park near us for various reasons has two Currys outlets; we bought our Freeview hard-disk recorder from one of the two places, but when we got it home it didn't work. Having phoned the (admittedly, demonstrably useless) Curry's customer service line we were told that the model we'd got was out of stock over the entire south-west of England (we'd offered to travel to any local Curry's branch to exchange the item). So we took it back to the original branch for a refund. On the in-branch stock checker, it turned out that the second Currys at the other side of the retail park apparently had the same model in stock; the assistant we were dealing with phoned and got them to check the recorder was really on the premises and arranged for us to collect it.

So I suppose in summary, the quality of Currys customer service is really quite variable, and their customer service line are a waste of space. I don't think it's a problem unique to this particular chain of retail outlets, however.

Summary: Perhaps not sellers of electronics for die-hard techhie-heads but all right for the high street