Kotaku 
Apr 23, 2007 8:40 AM
3,707
To: Crecente
From: Ashcraft
Subject: What's In A Name
And I'm back. With a vengeance, I guess. Parents are back on their way to the U.S. They had a wonderful time, I think, and it was good showing them around. Exhausting, too. Getting back into the swing of things... Ten minutes of this morning was spent with me freaking out in front of my keyboard. It was like I forgot how to blog. And to make up for my week long absence, this note gets longish, rantish as I dealt with some pretty shitty customer service today. I've put that after the jump, so do check it out if you are interested. If not, well, don't.
What you missed last night:
Okay! Like I said, my experience with closed minded UNIQLO customer service after the jump!
...The other chunk of the day was spent on the phone, dealing with UNIQLO customer service. Last night, my wife spent a good chunk of time pursuing its online store, looking for clothes we can lounge around the house in. So she gets to the check out — You know, the part where you enter your name and credit card — And the bleeping online store won't accept her name. See the online store only accepts five characters as Japanese last names usually have one, two or three kanji characters. Since my wife recently decided to take my name, her new last name has more than five characters. A good number of online sites aren't this antiquity. This is just poor design, really.
So! We called UNIQLO's online store this morning. The UNIQLO online store operator had a simple solution: Just write half your name. Being a credit card purchase, not sure how that would fly. What's more "Ashu" might be a swell nickname, but it's not our legal last name. Mrs. Bashcraft asked the operator's name? Operator said "Shinohara." Mrs. Bashcraft asked her if she's like to order things from UNIQLO using half her name — the moniker "Shino." The operator said no, she wouldn't like that. Okay, next solution: Write your name in the section for your address. Once again, "Ashukurafuto" isn't our address, it's our name.
At that point, the operator basically said that this was how they did things at the UNIQLO online store. So, anyone living in Japan (Japanese citizen or not) with a last name longer than five characters is shit outta luck. Sure, that's not a big number of people, but it does exist. And for those customers, that means the entire online store is closed off to you. Ironic for a retailer with a New York branch and possibly eyeing Banana Republic and THE GAP's lucrative business in the States. We asked to speak to that person's boss, and my wife talked to her for about twenty minutes. Basically, Mrs. Bashcraft wanted UNIQLO's online store to stop apologizing over-and-over again and commit to doing something — Like changing their website.
Granted, the request wasn't that they put the entire store in English. No, just increase the number of characters you can enter for you last name. That's it! A fair, logical request. Because, guess what, not everyone who uses it has a Kanji last name. But after twenty minutes, the conversation was at an stalemate with no word whether or not anything other than "I'm sorry" would happen. I asked if I could speak to the operator's boss. She told me that she was the section "leader." I asked for her name and for her office phone number. She gave me her name, but refused to give me anything other than the main phone number. She wouldn't give me her email address, either. I asked her to take my address so she could send me an email when the situation was resolved. She refused to do that. I also offered my phone number and fax. Likewise, she refused to take them. During all of this, she sounded like she was going to cry. Kinda felt bad for her, but she wasn't really helping the situation. She just kept apologizing and wasn't offering to help. In short: She was utterly useless.
I called UNIQLO's Tokyo office and told them what the deal was. They seemed nice enough, and then had a higher up at the online store call me back. After hemming and hawing, I got her to promise me that the website will be changed by December of this year. What's more, she took my email address and phone/fax number to inform me when the change will happen. She was professional and handled the situation very well because at that point I was fairly ticked off and wondered why this problem wasn't handled like this from the get-go and why the retailer hadn't been sympathetic to its customers. At all. During my wife's conversation with the operator, Mrs. Bashcraft said told her, "You are apologizing and expecting me to accept that, hang up and that to be the end of it. If we leave it at that, nothing will change." She's right. Nothing will.
UNIQLO America [Official Site]
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