Around 2 years to 3 years ago, I stumbled upon https://www.paulaschoice.com/ and entered my email address for their newsletter. Browsing through the site, I looked at a few products and than exited without thinking much about it. I started receiving their emails about promotions and most of the times deleted them without reading. A year later I was going through my bookmarks and came across it again. I thought "meh, why not check it out again". This time I read customer reviews about most of the products and how effective they are. Also living in Canada and having had my experiences with online shopping and shipping from different countries, the first thing I checked was the location of the company and the charges for shipping. Turns out that the company is located in USA, and I living in Canada lost all hopes of ever ordering anything from there because there was an additional $5.00 brokerage fee for shipments into Canada.
The emails I kept getting is the only thing that kept me reminding of this site, and I had it in my list of to-do things to unsubscribe soon. 2 weeks ago (on March 29, 2011) there the subject of the emails had a shipping special which was ending that day. Curious but an extreme pessimist about shipping (and fine prints and hidden charges) I opened the email to see if it applied to U.S only. And guess what? It applied to Canada as well! Just seeing that it was the same for U.S. and Canada honestly made me super happy and I ordered some products and samples (I'll write about them in another blog). Even with the $5.00 brokerage fee my shipping was $8.00 which is average shipping price I have seen. Also every order comes with 3 free samples! The shipping was fast and I received my order in about 5 business days.
I was super excited when I got the package in mail and opened it as fast as I could. The packaging was great and all the samples and small items were placed neatly in one ziplock bag, with a thank you card which had the name of the person who packed my order. I though this was very nice and sweet to include the name and have never seen it in other shipments and order I have received.
There was one problem though, the liquid in one of the bottles was 1/4 drained. Sigh!!!!! Again my pessimist side came up while I was dialing customer service number as I am used to hearing that nothing can be done. Still, I always try and hope for the best. So here I am sitting and waiting for some music to start and for a recording to tell me to press one to continue, but instead a person takes the call. Thats the 2nd plus point in my mind for this company. Now Hannah took the call and I told her that I had just opened it up and saw it drained in the box because there were also leaked mark through the cardboard box. I went on to explain also that maybe they opened it at Customs and didn't close it back and I don't know what to do. First off, she was super polite, and not the fake reading off the page polite which you can tell over the phone through their tone. She was genuinely polite, apologized for what had happened and said that there are several reasons why that happened and that it's difficult to point one reason out (I obviously knew that). Without doing any cross questioning or asking the same question 3 different times (as it usually happens), she informed me that they'll be sending the exact product again, and I can either discard or use up the bottle I had. I was so happy when i heard this that I think I thanked her 4 times. This was their 3rd plus point in my mind which is good enough for me to become a permanent customer.
Nowadays, customer service over the phone for different companies has been a nightmare. For me it does not matter where the customer service representative is located or what accent they are speaking in as long as they can communicate clearly and don't approach in a way that they doubt what the customer is saying is a lie.
I absolutely LOVE Paula's Choice now mainly because of the customer service that i received. As long as they offer discounted/ free shipping (hehehe) promotion once every few months I'll be there to shop away.
Have you had any good/bad experience with any cosmetic company and it's customer service? Has anyone tried anyone tried any product from Paula's Choice? Please share your thoughts and ideas with me :) !!!
Have an awesome, fantastic day and night.
Liha K.
