I ♥ Steelcase

Posted on November 7, 2014

Since 96% of the Internet is people bitching about companies that gave them poor customer service, I figured I may as well take a minute to tell you about a company that’s done right by me: Steelcase.

Longtime Readers™ will remember that, four years ago, I was in the market for a new chair for my home office. I ended up buying a Steelcase Leap. It wasn’t cheap — you can get them used, but I bought mine new, which cost around $900 — but I was impressed by how comfortable it was, and how much attention to ergonomics Steelcase appeared to have put into it. So, reflecting on how I was going to be sitting in whatever I bought for 8+ hours every weekday, and that therefore cheaping out on this was probably inadvisable, I bit the bullet and bought the thing.

Time passed, and I was very happy with the purchase. But I noticed one day recently that the little steel cylinder that juts out of the bottom of the Leap, where the gas cylinder that controls the chair’s height adjustment goes, had fallen down much lower than it was when I first got the chair. In fact, it was so low that it was dragging along the carpet when I moved the chair around. Which was a problem: no matter how nice the chair was to sit in, if it was going to start tearing up my carpet, it was going to have to go. Nightmare visions of having to pay $900 for a new chair just a few years after paying for the last one danced in my head.

I called the retailer I’d bought the chair through, the Healthy Back Store (who are also amazing, and who you should talk to if you’re looking for ergonomic furniture in the DC metro area), and they walked me through some adjustments to the chair that can often fix problems like these. They didn’t fix my problem, though, so the next step was for them to reach out to Steelcase for support.

Steelcase’s solution was pleasingly simple: no questions asked, they shipped, at their own expense, a completely new Leap chair right to my door. It’s even the same color as the one I bought four years ago.

They didn’t even ask for the old one back! So there was no muss, no fuss, no hauling a giant piece of office furniture down to a UPS store or something. Just a delivery guy showing up at my door with the solution to my problem. All I had to do was open the box and roll the new chair down the hall to my office.

Lots of companies would have made this a root-canal-painful process. So yeah, I’m a very satisfied Steelcase customer today.