I Swore…

I swore when I started this blog, that I would never get into the bad customer experience type posts. Well looks like I broke this resolution on Monday anyway, and this sort of re-iterates the points I made then – and even follows the sporting theme!

Anyway as the story goes, I needed some new running shoes. I went online on Monday to buy them, and the price was pretty attractive, and I tend to get through them pretty quickly so I placed an order for two pairs. Despite the promised 24 hour shipment, they turned up on Thursday. No great problem, because I wasn’t that desperate for them, but expectations are expectations. Anyway, I say they turned up, but actually only one pair turned up, with no obvious indications of the fate of the second. I sent an email to the vendor to enquire as to their status and, twenty fours hours, later I received the following email:

Dear Customer,
Thank you for your recent e-mail, however due to our busy sale period we are currently inundated with enquiries and are unable to guarantee an immediate response to e-mails, if your query is urgent please call our customer service team on [number removed by me to spare blushes]. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Kind Regards
Internet Response Team

I did indeed call the customer service team, who after some umming and ahhing, passed me on to someone, presumably in order processing, who declined my offer of their order reference, wanted my post code which he kept mis-hearing, which doubtless raised both our blood pressures, but we got there in the end. According to the system the shoes were indeed in stock, but no-one could locate them. The search I was informed was continuing, and if I was interested to know the results, I was invited to phone back the following week.

Ignoring the customer experience/satisfaction aspects, I can’t help feeling that it took the internet ‘response’ team marginally less long to put together the email to tell me they couldn’t help me, than it would have taken to actually answer the query. The query of course didn’t go away and several people had to spend time on the phone to resolve the matter, which must have eaten into some already pretty slim margins. And, who knows, perhaps one day the ‘response’ team will get through the back-log and ‘resolve’ the issue all over again.

Email is a pretty major means of communication, (especially if you are doing business on line), it’s therefore a potentially key part of the customer experience, and it’s a low cost means of handling a query. Which begs the question, given that this a far from isolated example, as to how many companies get it so consistently wrong.

Anyway no more bad customer experience stories for while – promise.

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