Fatface or flat in your face: how abuse of email and bad customer service damages relationships

Fatface, a clothing company, one of my favourites in the UK until now.  

For my birthday, I go online and buy a nice garment.  Decided to collec them in a store.  It is Sunday, and I get an email confirmation of the order,  the email says I should wait for another email telling me when the garment is in the store.  

I get another email on Monday, telling me it has been dispatched to the store.  I cannot wait.  My birthday is on Thursday, so I decide I will go there on that day.  Three more days...

Thursday comes, I drive to Fatface store in Weybridge, in the middle of a traffic jam. It is 11am.  I am anxious as I have little time to spare.  I show my reference number to the salesman, and I get the following: 

"Your order has not arrived yet.  I know it is confusing, but you should wait for another email telling them that the order has been received.  Sorry about this,  we can keep the item for as long as you need us to here.  When can you come back to collect it? "

I feel like falling flat in my face...

First I replied, I cannot drive to this store anytime I want,  I have a family and a job to look after.  

Secondly, why did I get an email telling me that the order was dispatched?  What is the value of doing this?

Third, you guys have a lousy transport system, it takes more than 3 days for items to arrive on store from wherever they have been stored.

Fourth, can I cancel the order now? 

To this last thing he then replies: 

"I am sorry but you have to wait for the item to arrive, collect it and then claim a refund"

That was the icing on the cake really..

Ok, I may have misread the email on Monday, but why did I need confirmation of dispatch? Many companies email you when they are about to deliver the item to you.  This email did not add anything. It confused me.   

Many companies misuse information systems.  As a customer, they get you involved in the mess of their supply chains through badly conceived emails.  And they top their inefficiency with a lousy customer service. All because they think that a supply chain is about saving money in transport and doing so by inundating customers with emails.  

This week I got another email reminding me that the item is in store, and that at the end of the week it will be returned to the warehouse and I will be refunded if I do not collect it.  It is still my fault, not theirs. 

On the day of my birthday, I told the clerk that I teach a course on e-business, and the apologised again but did not allow me to explain that a key idea is to think of the customer journey, the things we do online and offline to get what we want as a product.  There are customers who can afford to get to a store, and in my case I was also thinking of saving a bit of money in the delivery (£4.95 for a delivery whose delivery day is uncertain, so we still pay for Fatface inefficiencies in transport!). 

Understanding the customer journey means looking at me as a human being, what I do, what I expect.  Then we can design email and service systems together as a 'whole'.  As customers we do not need things that do not add value to our journey and our busy life in general.  We need convenience, opportunity, a helping hand, a shoulder to cry and a professional response from companies.  

You can re-read the above paragraphs and make up your mind as to what I got from Fatface. On the day of my birthday. 

A more careful consideration of this journey for people like me (even if I am in the minority of Fatface customer segmentation) would have made my birthday mor enjoyable.  So after falling flat in my face I decided to enjoy the rest of my birthday without Fatface. And perhaps I will enjoy the rest of my life without them.  

I have also learned that it is good to teach, it gives you ideas to check every day.  

Buy me now or wait until I grow older, wiser and become more expensive

Facebook announced last week the acquisition of WhatsApp, instant messaging platform in a deal close to 19billion US dollars.

One year ago the deal would have costed Facebook about one billion US dollars.  So the wait proved costly.  But at that point WhatsApp was not as widely known as it is now.  

The ecosystem of social media platforms and applications is very dynamic.  Not all of them survive the forces of the market and popularity.  Not all of them promote good practices.  Just remember Facebook Beacon's application.  It would connect Facebook with your purchases and would let everybody on your network know what you had just bought.  

The approach in that case was different.  It was the application collecting data without your full consent.  Now it is you who give that informants to Facebook via another application called Foursquare.  So you want to be popular and tell everybody you are in an expensive restaurant.  So you login in Foursquare.  And then Facebook (with your consent, presumably) would make sure advertisers know about your preferences.  The same can happen with WhatsApp users...

Facebook has grown wiser.  It is now more careful, it waits for people to adopt a new application before buying it or implementing a similar one.  But those people developing applications are also wiser, and they know that they can position themselves as indispensable and ask for anything in terms of money.  So that Facebook will have to take an interest later on when they have proved to be popular and acceptable.  

Will this transaction be beneficial for both parties? Well, WhatsApp owners have got some cash and shares.  Possibly they will also lead their company from the inside.  Like a good football player that is bought by a good team, the future lies not only in the player but on how the team play together.  We will see how well the management of this new venture does.  

Facebook wants to be the only social platform that people use to connect to each other.  The more we connect to Facebook the more they know about us, the more people like me look for alternatives.   I think I have grown older, bit wiser and definitely more expensive :)

My digital footprint

I was struck by a recent article in bbc news on the new Google acquisitions: smart thermostat maker Nest, and robotics company Boston Dynamics.  

You can read the article at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25725808

So it seems Google wants to have its fingers in many different pies.  And it wants to connect smart appliances to the internet.  

Inn the future we could have android running on these appliances.  That seems to be a way forward.  This is not in my predictions post (see my previous post), but it makes good sense.  Something that was announced in the book by Negroponte "Being Digital" (1995): you can talk to your microwave, your dishwasher or your car.  

According to this article Google seems to be going further than that.  It is collecting data about you and me.  Your presences when you search the web, when you set up your mobile phone.  And who knows, the type of food that you out in the microwave, your eating times, the routes that you take to go to work.  Google is connecting many things to the internet.  Or shall we say that Google is collecting your digital footprints?

Yes. 

Is this a bad thing?

Maybe, maybe not.  There is a lot of data out there, and we are becoming used to think that someone or something has to process it to help us in order to make our lives easier.  For instance we do not quarrel anymore about the weather forecast.  We seem to need to know what is going to happen.  We need that kind of 'information'.  Siri is supposed to learn from us and help us.  And we let it do it

The only problem that I see today is that we need to leave our digital footprints.  We need to leave them somewhere.  We also need to let Google collect them.  And then Google will create a knowledge base from which we can all learn new things.  But we will then learn and use what is suggested as best.  Or what comes first in our search for answers.  Your foot prints and mines together.  Collective intelligence.  What if that is wrong? What if we want 'out' of the collective? Now can we challenge it? 

Reminds me of Startrek and the Borg rather than Big Brother.  We are one. We think like one.  We assimilate others.  Resistance is futile...Only to discover that there was a Borg queen. 

Or shall we say two Borg kings?