Are Groupon finally addressing their customer service issues?

One of our staff here at Review Centre this morning received an email from Groupon. He had ordered a set of lights via an offer on the site back in January but then the fun started. They never arrived and email after email was sent asking for a refund or for the lights to be delivered. This unfortunately does not seem to be an isolated issue relating to deals through Groupon:

“I ordered 2 things off them, delivery was quoted as 4-6 weeks on both items, 1st item was delivered ofter 7 weeks. The second item, ordered on the 14th January 2012, has still not been delivered as of today, 05 March 2012, in spite of a delivery estimate of 4 – 6 weeks. Groupons customer service is non existent.”

Groupon has a fairly bad reputation on our site (they average a star rating of around 2 out of 5 stars) as recent customers have flocked to share their bad experiences. Members have used strong words to describe them, “scam” “fraud” “rip-off”. In most cases the actual problems appear to be due to the supplier of the deals not being able to cope with the huge demands placed on them. Perhaps they misjudged the amount of people their deal would reach. Groupon have also appeared to have some fairly large customer service failings with their refund policy being cited by several members as the reason for giving the company only a one star rating:

“Groupon would NOT refund. They would NOT even issue “groupon bucks” like they say they will on their website. GROUPON SUCKS. I will never, ever use them again.”

So the email that was received today nods at Groupon making a concerted effort to address these failings:

It sounds promising that they are looking to fulfill these orders themselves in order to retain members. Hopefully this is a step towards turning their reputation around.

What do you think? Do you still think that Groupon offers customers great deals? If you’ve ever used them we’d love to know what you thought of the experience. Add your review of Groupon here.