Complain about a product or service

Furnitureland South Responds

Furnitureland South
• Wrong color
• Defective merchandise
• Delivery problems
• Substitions/"not in stock"
• Employee responses

Jason Harris writes (12/13/03):
My family owns and operates Furnitureland South, Inc. in Jamestown, NC. We are a great company that is very focused on servicing our customers.

There is a complaint that continues to appear on search engines on your site that was written over four years ago by a customer named Tracy (editor's note: the customer's name is Tressie) from New Jersey. We have resolved this complaint years ago and I would greatly appreciate you removing this from your website.

When consumers search on Google or other search engines, this complaint appears quite often near the top of the list and it portrays our company in a negative light. Our service is the finest in the industry, and our reputation is very important to us.

I would greatly appreciate your cooperation with this request and would be happy to discuss this in detail with you.

Jason Harris
Executive VP
Furnitureland South, Inc.

Our response: We're glad to hear you resolved Tracy's complaint, but we have received many other complaints from consumers who have experienced a wide variety of problems with your company, many of which involved large sums of money.

We would be interested in learning if all of those complaints have also been settled and what measures you have taken to ensure that such problems don't occur in the future.

Our site exists to enable consumers to share their experiences with products, services and individual retailers so that they can make more informed buying decisions. Businesses can best protected their reputations by minimizing the problems that consumers encounter when transacting business with them.

A Furnitureland South employee, Dean, writes
Since today is my day off, I was surfing the web, and came across your web posting about our company. I have always watched and appreciated your excellent coverage of consumer issues. It is important to say that I am not speaking for Furnitureland South officially, but from personal observation. However after recently becoming employed by Furnitureland South of Jamestown, NC I wanted to make some comments on your current postings of complaints about our company by previous customers.

Most of the postings are old ones. The growth of Furnitureland South as with any company certainly will cause problems. Mr. Harris has since my employment, done all that was stated in your interview with him last year, and more, to make customer satisfaction their highest priority in the sale of furniture. With over 400 manufacturing suppliers that we sell for there have to be individual issues of damage or delays.

Since I started work in July, I can attest from personal experience that all furniture is inspected, from the factory at FLS’s 250,000 square foot Distribution Center, and either replaced or repaired depending on its damage from the original manufacture prior to any delivery to our customers. It is then re-inspected by delivery drivers, as to its good condition, prior to being loaded on trucks and its departure from Furnitureland South going to the customer. The customer then has the responsibility of re-inspecting the furniture at the time of delivery for any damage during its transit. If any apparent damage is noted by the customer, it is then either returned for replacement, or repair, with the delivery driver. And in some instances an adjustment is made with the customer, and the customer service department on agreed cost reductions rather than returning the item for minor damages. At the present time (9-15-02) we have less than 1% of our furniture returned for damage. Each customer has the ability through furniturelandsouth.com to track their order from the time of original order, from the factory to them on-line.

With their individual customer number and a personal customer service representative they usually know to the day and hour when to expect delivery of their furniture. As a new sales associate with Furnitureland South, and as a professional, I know that every effort is made to deliver the highest quality of product and service to our customers. The fact that our growth has been so great over the years attests to the many thousands of satisfied and repeat customers. And this includes many well-known celebrities.

There is an old saying that needs repeating here! "You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot please All of the People all of the time". THERE ARE PEOPLE YOU JUST CANNOT PLEASE, at any cost or effort! There are also times when customers order furniture and for whatever reason, they change their minds. If you were to go back today, and follow up with all the original complainants, you should find, that within all just reason, Furnitureland South has made every effort to resolve any issues that you have previously posted on your site. The fragile nature of fine furniture alone is reason enough to expect some unexpected damage, and delay issues.

The main concern here seems to be how they are resolved. I would not work with FLS if I did not believe that what I sell to my customers is not backed with all the resolve for 100% effort to satisfy my customers. In all fairness if you were to post the many thousands of letters from satisfied customers you might have a better perspective of this issue.

Maybe so, but a few points need to be made. First we have not received "thousands of letters from satisfied customers." In fact, we haven't received any. Second, Dean fulminates that "most of the postings" on our site are old when in fact there was, at the time of his email, only one posting -- and it was less than two years old. In fairness, we have added several more since then and will be happy to post Dean's response if he can tell us how each complaint was resolved.

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