Lake Neuron

I get nervous now whenever I write a positive post about a business that people will think it’s one of those sleazy sponsored posts. Let me state that I don’t, and I won’t, blog that way. But bloggers sometimes use their forum to complain about poor customer service, and in this case I got good customer service and wanted to give the company credit for it.

Sunday, my father had to go directly from church to the funeral home where he works part-time. My parents usually go out to eat after church, and so Mom asked me if I wanted to join her for lunch. I had received two different Chili’s gift cards for Christmas, one from the co-worker who had drawn my name and the other from a business acquaintance. They’d been burning a hole in my pocket, so I asked if we could go there for lunch. We had a great meal, and even ran into someone on the blogroll. I splurged and got a full rack of baby back ribs, something I wouldn’t normally do with my own money.

Even though my mother had invited me “Dutch treat,” I offered to pay for her meal. She adamantly refused, saying that I should use my gift cards on myself. So we had separate tickets. I turned in both my $10 and $25 gift cards, asking the waitress to burn off the $10 card first and discard it, so I’d only have one card to carry around. She agreed, and brought back my $25 gift card plus the ticket for my meal and the tickets for both gift cards.

Later, looking at the tickets, something seemed amiss, and I called Chili’s automated customer service line to check on the balance for my $25 card. It was only $7 and change. I knew that wasn’t right. I called Mom and confirmed that Chili’s had, in fact, charged her for her meal. But they seemed to have charged me for it as well.

Well, I got onto the Chili’s web site to leave a message. I wasn’t sure whether this would count as “about your visit” or “gift card questions and comments,” so I filled out the web site form both ways. Fortunately, I had all the paperwork, so I could give them the gift card numbers and the receipt number for my meal.

Today, I got a prompt and courteous e-mail back from the gift card department, crediting my account. I have to hand it to Chili’s (actually, I suppose the gift card department is just Brinker International, since all of their gift cards are good at all of their restaurant chains).

By the way, I also like that Chili’s clearly states on the card that no service charges are deducted. One of my father’s closest friends found out the hard way that some other restaurant chains start deducting fees from your card if it isn’t used within a certain period of time. That hardly seems fair, since when you buy a gift card the merchant already benefits in several ways. They get the interest on the money from the time the card is purchased until it is redeemed. They also benefit when a card is lost (or when there’s only a token amount left on a card and the owner throws it away rather than try to keep up with it). And of course, they benefit when someone brings along their mother, who would probably have picked Ruby Tuesday if it were not for her son’s gift card.

Tags: chili's, customer service