Great place to visit at night! Clean, friendly staff, good food. Love going to the old PCP.

Approximate cost: $50

I wouldn't recommend Keeki, I'm sorry to say, and I hope the owners read this review.
Because, the customer service in my case was very bad, in ways that could have been avoided.

We’ve literally just stocked up furniture for our house, and had excellent experiences with every other furniture provider, but was left very upset with Keeki. I’m going to be constructive here and suggest how things could have been different – just my two cents from my experience in the service industry.

We bought a Marble dining Table in December 2014. When the table was delivered, the packaging was left behind. This is apparently part of the Keeki delivery policy. The packaging we’re talking about is not just some cardboard, it includes a wooden frame. This frame took some effort to break apart and dispose of.

When you’re paying $3699 for a dining table, and also for the delivery separately, this is not a surprise you expect. All of our other furniture providers – hell, even appliances online, delivered the package, set up the furniture and took the materials away with them.

A few months later, we noted, what appeared to be a crack in the table that was spreading. Now Keeki has told me it wasn’t actually a crack, but something in the resin. I wasn’t convinced. Regardless, a line appeared on the table, let’s call it a mark, and started spreading from one side to the other.

Keeki sent someone out who said the table top would need to be replaced. We were told we would then have to wait. But we’re not talking wait 1 or even 2 months, we had to wait around 5 months for the table to be delivered again. During this whole time, we didn’t kick up a fuss, we didn’t ask for compensation etc. We just waited patiently. We were told that this is because ‘Keeki was a small business and didn’t have much in stock’. It would have to ‘come from China’. Mind you, the product continued (and is still) advertised on the website store. Specifically, Keeki did not offer us anything, and only apologised by saying the wait was ‘out of their hands’, and that ‘they were a small business’.

The mark slowly spread and spread, and eventually they came with a new table, some 5 or so months later. However, the table never made it out of the delivery truck because apparently, during the transportation it cracked!! (which leaves me wondering about the quality of these tables in the first place). So we were left with the old table, and another promise…. Wait another 4 months for the next table shipment from China.

In conversations with the customer service staff, there’s never a proper apology. The only apology is always ‘we’re sorry you feel this way’. And ‘we’re a small business’. And my personal favourite ‘things happen’ or ‘things go wrong’ in business. Never any ‘I’m sorry, we stuffed up.
We VALUE you as a customer’. Never any act, no matter how small, of offering something to make us feel better. Never any admission that the business failed, and perhaps could be run better. Nope. Just ‘these things happen’.

Cut forward, many conversations later, we’re given a date – the end of June, for the table to come. The date comes and goes. We email around this date asking when the delivery is happening – no immediate reply. We post on their facebook page saying something to the effect of ’10 months later, we still don’t have our table back’. The mark or crack by this time has spread almost to the other side. And our friend, an engineer, is beginning to worry that it could be at risk of breaking… Whether his opinion is valid or not, it was a cause of genuine concern to us.

We end up writing an email with 3 immediate requests:

1) Let us know if the table is a risk to kids or our tiled floors
2) Give us an ETA for delivery of the table – specifically a ‘latest date’ that the table should arrive by
3) Please give us some compensation for what we’ve gone through – specifically, half the price of the table back would be what we would appreciate.

When we finally get on the phone, more of the same customer service. We’re told the table is not a risk. We’re told we can’t be given a date for delivery because ‘we can’t predict how long it would take to go through customs’. The date we were given is for when the ‘shipment might arrive at the dock’ (because this is obviously the relevant date for us, the customer, awaiting the delivery). And we’re told that they can offer ‘nowhere near the amount of compensation we’re asking for’. Any attempts to rationalise this with her are met with ‘things happen in business’. Add to this, ‘you’ve enjoyed the (cracked) table for all this time’.
In the end, I finally ask for a refund, which is forthcoming. But I tell them, I’m unhappy and I should be compensated a bit more. I give some reasons for this, including, that the chairs we have had tailored made (costing about $800 each) match the table. We’re told this is not an option. I suggest I should go to VCAT to see if I can get more, I’m told the law doesn’t work like this. I clarify that I am in fact a lawyer. No love.
So the table gets picked up – we get given a cheque. No apology. No sorry we could have done better. No gift voucher. In fact, no admission anything could have been done better. Just ‘things happen’.

The things I would like to point out for Keeki to consider are:
- It’s a terrible thing to do to make a customer’s business feel unwanted. This impacts your business in many ways – the least of which, is negative word of mouth.
- A request for compensation – which we have never asked anyone to do before, is, when dealing with reasonable customers that have waited 10 months before even raising, is something you should consider reasonably when you have failed in your customer service.
- Specifically you have failed by not meeting the warranty requirements of your table in a reasonable period of time.
- Don’t ever give your customer’s the excuse that ‘things happen’. This is not good enough in business. When ‘things happen’, a professional business should absorb these things, not tell the customer to put up with it. Saying something like : ‘we’re sorry, we tried, but we messed up. Your business is important to us. Here’s a small token of our appreciation to let you know we are important to us. We are looking at how we could avoid this in the future. We can offer you a full refund if you can’t wait’ is so much better.
- When things escalate, the customer feels uncared for, and is asking for compensation, don’t say ‘you’ve enjoyed the table for the last 10 months’. You know what – that is just a poor effort. I didn’t pay the full price for a table with a great big mark in the centre of it. I paid full price for a complete table. It’s not fair to say as a reason why I should not need compensation.

So there it is – my rant on my experience with Keeki. Yes I know it’s long, but I don’t usually post reviews like this, and when I do, I try and make them fair – with as little bias as possible.
If someone from Keeki is reading this – hopefully, someone who owns the business, think about our experience, and think about how it could have been done differently. Because I assure you, these interactions cannot be good for your business. And they could easily be avoided with some good customer service, specifically, acknowledging your fault when things go wrong, and thinking about making the customer feel valued.

Approximate cost: $3699