AptDeco Fiasco - A detailed account of my horrible experience
While I used AptDeco a couple of times in the past with positive results, my last experience was highly disturbing, to say the least. It was upsetting and disappointing enough for me to proactively warn others of their subpar customer service and corporate management teams, and enough for me to contact one of their board members in an attempt to flag my concern surrounding the manner in which the broader AptDeco team manage grave customer issues and emergencies - ignore the matter and hopefully the issue will subside.
In short, I posted and quickly sold two beautiful marble dining tables on AptDeco. After the pick-up team missed the 3-7pm pick-up window on a Saturday afternoon, a team of two finally showed up at my apartment after 10pm that night. They showed up in an unmarked white vehicle (not the advertised orange AptDeco van) and while one of the delivery individuals was an AptDeco employee wearing the AptDeco orange shirt, the other individual was not, however accompanied the other as a helping friend. When I asked about this, they declined to provide the name of the helping friend and assured me it wasn't anything to be concerned with. This was the first red flag and set the tone for the remainder of the night.
The AptDeco experience resulted in 2 damaged, non-sellable marble tables, a large contingent of police officers called by my neighbours due to the chaos and noise created by the shattering tables, an injury sustained by the friend of the AptDeco employee as a result of a dropped table, and ultimately, a non-responsive AptDeco Customer Service and management team.
Multiple emails and calls (they do not provide a customer service number so I attempted to call their corporate offices) were extended the night of the event and for several days after. One Customer Service individual acknowledged my urgent query the day after the event however I experienced deafening silence by AptDeco's Customer Service team and co-founders in the days after. I went as far as emailing the co-founders directly, the broader AptDeco team and one of the board members begging that they please acknowledge my concerns and requests.
While their board member had the professionalism and decency to acknowledge my query and offer to look into it, the co-founders and Customer Service team hid behind the issue and never attempted to even acknowledge the atrocity they were accountable for and proactively ignoring. Their answer was to ignore the issue, hope the noise goes away and simply deposit a small sum of money in my bank account to partially cover the cost of the broken tables.
Given AptDeco was co-founded by an individual who was inspired to start the company on the back of a terrible experience with another NYC buying/selling company, I thought they would have acknowledged my request and addressed it in a more proactive manner. Instead, there was no acknowledgement, no discussion, no professionalism, no human empathy.
AptDeco's co-founders and management team have much to learn in terms of proper customer responses and crisis management, and I hope that my experience will serve as a text book case for future situations. I cannot in good conscience recommend use of AptDeco to anyone at all, however will give AptDeco one star for their positive sustainability impact.