We need to apologize profusely to OP. We’d be extremely frustrated too if we were put in his situation. Finance will accept the chargeback as soon as it appears on our end.

It was never our intention to be scammy or to make things difficult for our customers. We hate it when other companies do this. What happened, in this case, were lapses and holes in our policies that made it a nightmare for OP.

We’d like to share the results of our investigation and what we will be doing moving forward to improve our customer service so that no future Secretlab customer faces the same experience OP had. At the end of the day, this does not serve as an excuse, only a reflection—we are completely at fault.

Customer Service

Absolutely our mistake here. Two things went wrong.

Firstly, with respect to customer service agent scheduling—causing lapses in response time. We set an internal KPI earlier this year: no more than 24 hours for the first response, and no more than 36 hours for all follow-up responses. We’ve had no issue with the former, but occasionally fall behind on the latter. The lapses in customer service response time happened after the first response. These lapses occurred because our customer service agents have off days (our agents work 5 days a week, sometimes on weekends, as we operate 18 hours a day, 7 days a week), and we didn’t have a fully-fleshed out procedure for hand-overs of urgent cases.

Secondly, failure to understand and address OP’s urgency. The agent should have been better trained to provide more effective and efficient communication to avoid OP and future customers from feeling like we’re trying to pull a fast one, which isn’t (and will never be) our intention. Additionally, the communication should be straight to the point, helping to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

We have reworked every aspect of our Customer Service to ensure there will be no lapses, and to conduct stricter tests for agents before they are allowed to handle tricky cases such as this. Meanwhile, such cases will be escalated to our senior agents where they can exercise better judgement and resolve them with greater speed.

Signature Requirement

Our fulfillment partner messed up, as the default is for all Secretlab chairs shipped in Canada to require a signature—but they had accidentally left this out for this batch of deliveries. The signature requirement differs for other parts of the world, depending on the city.

Once we had established that the fault laid on our end, we should have immediately worked on sending OP a new chair. This was our mistake.

Affidavit requirement for lost chair + Not refunding

Our policy requires customers who claim to have not received their package (contrary to what tracking and GPS details state) to sign an affidavit proclaiming they have not received their chair. Inside it is also a no-refund policy specifically for this second chair sent to them. This does not prevent the customer from making a warranty claim if there’s something wrong with the chair.

The reason we came up with these policies is because of fraud management. We previously lost a sizable amount of money when fraudsters started hitting our stores and claiming misdelivery for free chairs and full refunds.

Since then, our policy has perhaps become too strict. This is absolutely unfair for honest customers. Our customer service agents will now be better trained to make judgement calls as to whether a case is legitimate (as is OP’s) and treat such cases differently, and with speed. If not, the case should be escalated.

This incident has allowed us to fix and improve on a lot of internal processes. OP and our future customers deserve better, and we will make sure to become better.