Bronwyn K

UnCaring Candies

I am completely amazed and appalled by the service I have received from Caring Candies. I made and paid for an order of sugar-free cooking chocolate (and additional stock for our business amounting to over R1000) so that I would have it in time to make Easter eggs with my family and for my kid's teachers this past weekend. Caring Candies mispacked my box, and sent me an order that should have gone to someone in the Free State. While I can understand that accidents such as these happen, the failure to deliver my box was directly due to Caring Candies' error, and caused us to miss the chance to make the Easter eggs as a family in the time I had planned, and I had to buy additional chocolate to make eggs for the teachers in time. I phoned the company to lodge a complaint about this inconvenience and got a very defensive reply that they were trying to get the order to me and I should just be patient. I tried to express that the inconvenience to me was already substantial, and that if the package didn't arrive very soon its entire purpose would be lost. I feel that is a fair complaint to lay given the error on Caring Candies part, and I expected some gesture of humility or restitution for the inconvenience. Instead, to my utter amazement, Denise, the manager I was speaking to, became extremely defensive and emotional to the point that she was shouting at me down the phone. She was obviously having a stressful time trying to get the courier situation resolved and somehow that became my fault. I told her to forget it, I should never have phoned and would like her to please stop screaming at me and end the phonecall. She continued, so I asked again. Finally I hung up the phonecall because I was not interested in taking abuse from someone I should have been receiving an apology from. I proceeded to write to Neil Glezer-Jones, the CEO, to make him aware of the shocking customer service experience I had had. Instead of making a sincere apology, he defended the employee, who turned out to be his wife, without recognizing my grievance at all. It felt like he was implying that I was at fault for the situation. After some very unfriendly emails, Denise finally made an apology in which she implied that I had attacked her character. This was patently untrue, since the complaint was entirely against the company and its failure of service or effective recompense for the inconvenience it had caused. I accepted the apology none-the-less, and made my own for the misunderstanding, in the interests of resolving the situation. To my utter amazement I found a new email reopening the conflict from Neil this morning, basically belittling my grievance and implying that I am unreasonable. I indicated that I no longer wished to do business with such a company and he has proceeded to delete me from his ordering system, not once ever even faintly acknowledging the poor behavior displayed by his company in this experience. I am completely dumbfounded that a company that styles itself as "Caring" could be so committed to conflict rather than customer service.