One of the problems that customers currently face with Dabs.com, when they have support issues, is find a eral person to talk to. Several years ago Dabs.com announced they were to drop telephone customer support in favour of email support. This has lead for many customers to days, weeks even months of delays in try to get a refund or a replacement for a defective product.

The Dabs.com website has recently had a face lift which saw the addition of several useful tools for finding the product you require. Dabs.com also seems to consitently offer the best prices and, when they get their act together, delivery is generally quite quick.

If, under BTs management, the customer support can be vastly improved I may even be tempted to shop at Dabs.com again.

This brought to thinking about Dabs.com. The company has notoriously bad customer services which is handled only via email. How damaging would it be for the company if its customer services department was crippled because it was being flooded by emails?

To be honest I don’t really think that an email DoS could really have much impact on its already appalling levels of service, but its nice to know that we’ve got the legal go ahead to launch such an attack.

So, who’s up for the challenge? (Please note that I am not advocating any illegal activity here!)

The article is an overview of some of the rights of consumers in the UK and gives a good guide to your rights when buying goods and to the level of service you should expect if anything goes wrong.

Link from BoingBoing

Any way, prompted by the appearance of the Dabs.com domain in my logs I decided to have another quick search to see what others have to say about Dabs’ bad customers services. I came upon this amusing story by “Chris”.

Its seems from his experience that if you are having trouble with Dabs.com then you should (failing getting a response from Customer *cough* Services) try contacting Bolton Trading Standards with your complaint. I don’t have the contact details for them but will try and find them. Chris also offers some good advice as to how you handle a complaint with Dabs.com. You should remember to keep a record of all correspondence with Dabs.com and NEVER be abusive otherwise you’ll loose all your rights.

I have no idea if this person still works for Dabs or if this number is still valid for Dabs:

Louise Derbyshire
Phone: +44 (0)870 429 3701
lderbyshire@dabs.com

person:       Paul Sharrock
address:      dabs.com plc
address:      Direct House
address:      Wingates Industrial Park
address:      Westhoughton
address:      Bolton
address:      BL5 3XD
address:      UK
phone:        +44 1942 853451
fax-no:       +44 1942 857451
e-mail:       psharrock@dabs.com

There is also these company details which I don’t think I’ve posted on my site before:

dabs.com PLC
Direct House, Lancaster Way
Bolton, Greater Manchester BL5 3XD
UK
Phone: +44 (0)1942 853100
Fax: +44 (0)1942 857100

I am now able to offers visitors to my site an email address to which they can send any pieces of information which you feel could help my website. Whilst I personally am not able to assits in any Dabs.com customer disputes there may be other people out there reading my site that can.

The email address is: dabs.comsucks@gmail.com.

My current problem with Dabs.com is that I have decided that I’m not going to be using their not quite so wonderful services any more. Therefore, I would like to delete my details from their system just incase the decide to violate the data protection act and perform unauthorised processing on my personal data.

Reading the help documents on the Dabs site it seems that they don’t like you deleting your details. They recommend that if you want to close your account that you should delete your address, your credit card details and reset your account password to a long random string.

But why can’t I just delete my account? No messing around… just delete it?!?! Well, it seems that some clever bod decided, when their system was being designed, that everything should be customer account centric. Therefore if you delete an account all of the transactions for that account will be lost, something which would break Dabs.coms legal obligations with regards their accounting, so you account has to exist on their system.

So I should be able to just delete my address and credit card details? Well lets give it a go…

Oh dear! There seems to be a slight problem. It would appear that my account needs to have a valid address and a valid credit card. But the help docs say I can delete my address and credit card?!?! This time it would appear that the clever bods that designed the Dabs.com system have said that every customer must have a valid address so they can receive their orders and they must have a credit card to be able to pay for their orders. But I don’t want to make any more orders!!! Are you sure? After all the bods at Dabs.com know whats best for your account!

Enter customer support. These are the guys that know all the answers, so lets just give them a quick phone call and get this whole thing sorted out. Doh! They’ve taken away the customer support phone lines. I’ll just have to email them instead.

The response I received was the same as the help docs – delete your address and credit cards and set a random password (I can’t include the original as it contained a non-disclosure disclaimer). To which I replied:

I have tried deleting my payment methods and addresses but the “system” said I had to have atleast one payment method and atleast one address. I tried entering rubbish data into the address but was met with a “not a valid postcode warning” and I could not create a blank credit card as I was told the card number was “not valid”.How, in this case, am I supposed to clear my data from the system?

at least
That was on Friday. This morning when I received the following email (non-disclosure disclaimer not included):

Hi

Thank you for your email to dabs.com’s customer service team.

Due to the nature of your enquiry, we need to liaise with either another dabs.com department, or another company (i.e. manufacturer or courier) before we’re able to reply.

This will help ensure we resolve your query first time.We’re getting on with this right now and will get back to you with an update as soon as possible.

As we’re depending on a reply from someone else, it can take up to 48 hours (excluding weekends) to obtain a response – so thank you in advance for your patience.

You may be interested to note that answers to most enquiries can be found on our website at http://www.dabs.com/uk/help/ where you’ll find a list of commonly asked questions with step-by-step resolutions.

With warmest regards
dabs.com customer services team
www.dabs.com

So what can information can we gain from this? Well, not only are the help documents on the website incorrect and misleading but Dabs.com also seems to have kept their support team misinformed as well. What a recipe for success!

I have also done a bit of snooping around on the WayBackWhen machine on archive.org. It appears that Dabs.com is reducing their stock base. In March 2003 they had 21,414 products but at the moment they’re down to 19,869. I’ve also noticed that they have taken down the notice about how many orders they’ve processed in the previous month… is this a sign of a down-turn in Dabs.coms luck? Have they become too profit centric for their own good? Only time will tell.

These details were obtained from the Network Solutions whois search results for dabs.com.

Administrative Contact   :
  Fletcher, Steven
  sfletcher@dabs.com
  Direct House, Lancaster Way
  Westhoughton
  Bolton, Greater Manchester BL5 3XD
  UK

  Phone: +44 (0)1942 853488
  Fax: +44 (0)1942 857488

Update:
I’ve had another look on the Whois records for Dabs, and it appears that they have a different record for their Dabs.net entry. If you’ve had no luck with the previous numbers you may like to try this contact (I’m not sure if this John Fletcher and the Steven Fletcher above are related!?):

Administrative Contact:
    Fletcher, John
    jfletcher@dabs.com
    Direct House
    Wingates Industrial Park
    Westhoughton
    Bolton, Lancashire BL5 3XD
    UK
    0870 129 3348

Will Dabs.com pull though in the end with their dignity still in tact? Or will they make a pigs ear of the returns process as well?

Watch this space!!!