In the early days of cross-channel retailing, research showed that absent adequate systems to support opportunities like buy online, pick up in store, retailers were bruting their way to cross-channel consistency. In fact, in a report I wrote for a prior employer I said,

“Retailers achieving best-in-class performance are mostly ‘bruting’ their way to higher sales. As the volume of cross- and multi-channel sales increases, these retailers will find themselves at a customer service disadvantage. ” ¹

Here it is, seven years later, and we’ve moved from cross-channel to omni-channel retailing, from CD delivery of software to on-demand downloads, and yet some retailers still seem to use hope and brute force to create consistency. And brute force just doesn’t work. Witness my recent story.

For whatever reason, I decided to buy a copy of Quickbooks. I’ve gotten pretty accustomed to a media-less life, and so I ran Quickbooks download through a search engine. Instead of using my typical go-to resource of Amazon.com, where I couldn’t seem to find a digital software download, I opted for another retailer who was selling the product at a reasonable price point. I’m going to leave this retailer nameless for reasons you are about to see, but trust that this was no fly-by-night operation. And there was a time when the company’s systems expertise was legend in the industry.

I went to the retailer’s web site, and did all the right clicks and pushed all the right buttons. I was supposed to get an email with a link to the download page within an hour. The date was June 26, at about 9 in the morning. The order completed, but I never got the promised email, so I went back to the web site to look at my order and it was reporting a delivery date of July 3! I used the customer service chat feature (on-line chat #1) and chatted up someone in Indonesia (I think). He was courteous and friendly, and assured me he had fixed my order, and I’d be receiving my email within 24 hours.

By 4 PM I was growing a bit antsy so I used the on-line chat feature again. I was going to put the transcript here, but decided against it. It’s boring and consists of a lot of epithets on my part along with insistence from the CSR that I must have received the email. However, this sentence is really instructive, as it shows exactly what’s wrong with the retailer’s systems:

“I will submit a request with the back end team and a case specialist will keep a follow up regarding the same.”

The back end team???? I was trying to download some software, and eight hours later, a request was being submitted to the back end team?

At that point I just requested the retailer to please cancel my order. To make that happen, I received a phone call from a supervisor (also from some foreign land). She assured me that sometime in the next NINE days a refund would be credited to my account. Nine days. If it was more than $139 I might’ve cared. I just said, “Whatever ” and then tried to find the software again. I found the software digital download on Amazon, and it was downloaded and installed in under five minutes, just the way I expected it to work.

Over the ensuing week or so I received two more phone calls from specialists from the first retailer with status updates on my refund. I had checked PayPal and seen the refund had processed before I got my last call telling me that refund would be processed soon.

Oh my! The retail price of this software was $139. I’m not sure what the cost to the retailer was but for the sake of argument assume it paid $60 to the vendor. Heck, we can say the retailer paid a dollar, leaving it with a potential profit of $138. That’s a good number. And considering that by the time we were through I’d had two on-line chats (20 minutes each), and four phone conversations, even if I would have actually received the software, the company wouldn’t have made a dime.

Of course I won’t be buying anything from this retailer again anytime soon, and when its earnings come up, I expect there will be many blips just like my own adding up to a real whack at profitability. But my words from seven years ago sound strangely prophetic in retrospect. A customer service disadvantage. Yes, I would say this retailer is at a disadvantage. You know, it would have been better not to even offer the download option. I’m sure plenty of people are happy to buy their software on CDs. But it offered something more modern, and failed miserably. Its brand promise was broken.

This leads me to ask again…how many of us are in the same situation? A rather enormous company embarrassed itself because it tried to be something it’s not, and that its systems couldn’t support. Do we do the same across the industry? If we do, it’s time to stop, take stock and figure out how we’re going to move forward. This whole on-demand thing is for real. If we can’t play to win, we really shouldn’t play. And if we can’t play today, we have to find a way to play tomorrow, because there’s no going back. We really shouldn’t make promises we can’t keep, yet there are some promises we’re going to have to make. We just have to get our systems houses in order. And keep them that way.  

¹ The Multichannel Retail Benchmark Report  – Where Is the True Multichannel Retailer, 12/2005, ©2005 Aberdeen Group, by Paula Rosenblum, p.8