| rev:text
| - Poorly trained when it comes to their credit program.
Go to ikea.com and you will find that IKEA now offers financing. The company providing this service is Comenity Bank.
As a former manager and current sales associate for a company that sold its in-house financing to Comenity and another bank for over $1,000,000,000 (that's one BILLION US dollars), I know first-handedly the ins and outs of how Comenity works and how simple mistakes in an application through them can mess everything up; further, when we sold out, we underwent weeks of conference calls with Comenity and very thorough training with the system, and were also given a directory of telephone numbers for both our guests as well as for store staff use only...
That being said, a friend and I are moving tomorrow. Due to his perfect credit and the fact that Comenity issued him a $10,000 limit account through my company, we figured that Comenity (IKEA) would be gracious enough to do the same.
Well, we went to IKEA this evening and inquired about their financing. The associate was dumbfounded and stated that IKEA did not offer financing. While she was polite, the truth is that she, literally, had no idea that IKEA even had financing!!!
After informing her that their site said that you could use your IKEA card in store, she still said that it was for online only and that they did not offer financing.
Eventually, another associate intervened and said that they just began offering financing in February and that we would have to go upstairs to the Kitchens area to apply.
We did. Unfortunately, my friend used our prospective address (the one to where we are moving to tomorrow) as his address and the application was declined.
Now, since I've been working with opening credit accounts for guests for nearly five years, and I was a manager for nearly four of those years, and have been working with Comenity accounts since we sold out to them nearly a year ago, I figured that an associate could call and correct the application by simply viewing my friend's government issued ID (which has his address on it).
Not only did the associate fail to even ask for an ID, which is required for Comenity applicants, but the associate didn't even have a number to Comenity!!!
She spent time telephoning management...and management didn't have the number, either. I argued with them and eventually Googled 'Comenity financing IKEA customer care telephone number" and VOILA!!! There was the telephone number!
The Comenity rep said that an IKEA staff member would have to call...and refused to proceed with the call, so we told the associate...and the associate, once again, telephoned management...and they said that they couldn't do that because they had no number.
My point: IKEA lost about $5,000+ of business today because their associates are poorly trained and haven't mastered even the basics of credit customer service.
The associates tried helping, but the fact that they had no clue as to how anything works, let alone the fact that they offer financing, reflects directly upon management and their corporate structure. Apparently, they don't care about helping their customers.
Note: the first question that your associates should ask when an inquiry regarding applying for financing should be, "May I see your driver's license or government-issued ID?"
Simply counseling my friend could have prevented his being denied, and the associate should have done just that, or could've consulted with a manager for verification. I would have told him to use his current address, but, in this instance, it wasn't my job to give advice as to whether he should his current address or the one he's moving to tomorrow. I work for neither IKEA nor Comenity Bank.
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