The elimination of store positions in the operational areas has caused a void at the store level, and disastrous results in Lowe’s customer service levels in the install and delivery areas. Customers are losing any faith in the ability of this company to deliver in these areas. They are leaving in droves. CPO/IST and Third Party are a complete and utter failure! The installers are running roughshod over the customers and bad mouthing the stores in the field. They know they can call the naive and inexperienced call center employees, blame it on the store, and run from the problem. Delivery? The third party complaints are mounting HOURLY! It is a DISASTER! I guess the elimination of payroll and benefits was the only goal. What are you going to do when there aren’t any customers?
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Sometimes you got to make the new rollout go to down in flames I add gas not water
Are you got to do it's like we do keep that cpo agent on hold until you have no customers waste time
The corporate office is clueless. That’s it in a nutshell.
The problem as I see it is we have way too many people at the corporate level that have zero experience working in the stores and thus no understanding of how things work in the real world. They are totally insulated from the consequences of their decisions. Recently I read on Linkedn how a whole gaggle of these corporate “experts” were touring stores in south Florida handing out stupid patches and taking selfies to post on their social media accounts. I read their work histories and guess what? None of these ladies had any in-store experience—zilch. And yet these are the people running our company now. At least back in the day a corporate job was generally a reward for someone that had demonstrated exceptional aptitude at the store level and demonstrated they knew how things worked. Not any more …..those days are long gone.
Agree wholeheartedly!!! The old saying "penny wise, pound foolish" applies to the direction Lowe's is going in.
I think if corporate is being honest with themselves they too would have to admit that the quality of the 3rd party delivery service is not what they anticipated. We have been using them for approximately two years in my area and they are just as pathetic now as when they started. What I can't seem to understand is why corporate doesn't appear to be doing anything to correct it?
As for a remotely operated CPO, they can't pull or inspect product, verify staged status, perform refund/rebills, print loading tickets, etc, etc so it is just more tasking that has been offloaded onto others that still have a position at the store. I would estimate that the appliance and millwork departments are the most affected and customer complaints are through the roof.
The most recent change is them going down to a single install company per department so if the installer alienates the customer we have absolutely no recourse. Having singular mission critical points of failure is never a good idea. Clearly we must have many in corporate that have no concept of what "risk mitigation" is all about.