If you’ve ever checked out failblog.org, the title of this post may make you chuckle. Or wince. Or slap your forehead. Or do a Homer Simpson. In recent letters to PlanetFeedback, companies have shown that a having a good (or even great) idea isn’t good enough: There has to be follow-through. One letter described a woman’s struggle to get UPS to find her wedding dress. Another more recent letter details a woman’s ordeal with Lowe’s system of online ordering with store-pickup within a set timeframe.
While the issues these two consumers describe are different and the processing systems involved are different, one thing is true of both: The procedures/systems in place at both of these companies failed, and failed miserably.
With the wedding dress lost by UPS, we’re left wondering why and how that system failed. Aren’t the bar codes on each package scanned and rescanned at every step along the way? If one step in the process got missed, why can’t UPS backtrack to find out the last scanned point of the dress? At that point, one could assume that UPS would be able to narrow down the likely suspects (our suspicious nature makes us more likely to believe this is a matter of employee theft, rather than a glitch in the system).
With the issue at Lowes, where the consumer placed an online order with guaranteed pickup after two hours, the problem would seem to lie in management and employee training and awareness. Lowe’s has a great idea (consumers can save time by shopping online from home, find what they need, order it, then pick it up a few hours later, rather than spend time walking through the store, looking for what they need), but if each individual store can’t follow through with its obligation in the process, there’s no point to offering the service! And this idea is an excellent one, as it would be ideal for a parent with kids in tow, someone with mobility issues, etc., so it’s a shame that this organization hasn’t devoted the necessary resources to making it the success it could and should be.
We don’t have the technical expertise or know-how to start telling either company how to fix their broken systems, but as consumers, we have every right to complain when a business sets us up for high expectations and then fails to deliver on those promises.
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