Monday 15 August 2011

Retailing 101: How not to deliver service

Last week I ordered an soda maker from a web-store of an large and established Finnish home appliance and electronics retail chain. The web shopping experience was pleasant and I was delighted that I could select my order to be delivered to an near by shop of theirs. I was even more delighted when they e-mailed to me and told explicitly that my order was ready to be collected after two working days. However as I had worked in retailing before, I knew that their information and logistical system just couldn't be this good and up to the job, and I was right.
 
Today I went to the store to pick up my soda maker. When I approached the salesperson and told that I had come to get my delivery, he was surprised, told me that they didn't have the machine, that they didn't usually sell it in their store, that to his knowledge even supplier had difficulties on delivering them. He then went on and started browse some papers on his desk, he found my order notification from the papers, but there was no machine. As I knew that the local shop wasn't at fault, I just left the shop, feeling little bit blue that I had just wasted my time and effort, not to mention that I hadn't got what I had been promised. But lets think on why this did happen, why did they fail their service promise. In my opinion they failed because they...

..made the service promise too early
When they sent me the email that my order could be retrieved in two business days, they probably hadn't even shipped the product. Their promise solely leaned on their belief that they had the product available in their or suppliers warehouse, and that their logistics could deliver it just in time. This is just plain stupid. The only time when you make an explicit promise on when you deliver a product is when you have shipped the product, and even then you add few days extra to be sure that you can keep the promise. In this instance making a promise that they will deliver in two days was just madness.

..made an unnecessary service promise
I as an web consumer am not time constrained, I order from the web because it is convenient for me and because I have the time to wait, if I need a product right now, I walk into a brick and mortar store and buy it from there. For me as an consumer loving convenience, it would have been much better if they had send A) notification that they had received the order; B) notification that they had shipped the product, or that they have difficulties on shipping it; C) notification that the product has been delivered to a store and I can pick it up from there.

Now somebody working in retail and knowing department store systems, could probably say that it just costs too much and is too complicated to network systems that date to end of 80s or beginning of 00s to do what I suggest. Well I disagree with that strongly. If modifying the department store system and ERP would cost too much, then they could have just build an extra interface to the web store where they could have stores to receipt incoming deliveries and launch delivery notifications based on that. Coupled with an increased time frame for the delivery they could have provided a better customer response and a promise that they actually could have fulfilled.

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