For many businesses, providing outstanding customer service is a fairly straightforward task – deliver great service at all points of contact and do everything you can to meet and exceed expectations. So why do some brands fail to achieve this, and what can we as small or medium-sized businesses learn from this (a follow-up to last month’s blog)?
A case in point: Hudson’s Bay
For our friends to the south, Hudson’s Bay is an iconic retail brand in Canada that started way back in 1670 as a fur trading outpost. I have long been a loyal customer of theirs for a variety of reasons, including excellent quality products and brands, reasonable prices plus of course the patriotic lure! Unfortunately, what HB has struggled with for quite some time is the level of service they deliver to their customers.
Case in point – I purchased a new piece of luggage for my wife for Christmas online on Black Friday. Their cumbersome and poorly designed website made things challenging from the get-go due to poor navigation, page loading issues, etc.
Who said online purchases were easy?
I was finally able to find a product I thought she’d like, and after some minor issues was able to purchase it. Mission accomplished? Heck no, this was just the start of a debacle that would last for several days. I was mildly concerned that I didn’t receive an email confirmation promptly but figured it was just because of the high volume of online transactions that day.
I received my confirmation the next morning and felt I was good to go. Much to my surprise, the following Monday I received the following email:
Guess what, HB had cancelled my order! Why? I had no clue as this generic email gave no reason. To make a long story very short, I found out they had a problem with their inventory management system, oversold certain highly discounted items and then turned around and cancelled the orders for all affected customers.
Delivering a poor customer experience
So how do you think I felt? Upset and annoyed wouldn’t be the half of it. After spending close to an hour purchasing this item and then having all this happen, I was miffed. I immediately contacted their customer service team and spent some more time trying to resolve this matter.
Lessons learned
As marketers and business owners, what can we learn from such unpleasant experiences? Well here’s my list of the key takeaways every business should consider when trying to do right by their customers:
- Even online, your customers are real people. Treat them as such with each and every interaction.
- Everyone makes mistakes, even businesses and there’s nothing wrong with that. But you need to have a reasonable and logical problem resolution process in place for these scenarios or you risk upsetting your customers and losing them.
- Honour your customer commitments. If you screw up, don’t make your customers suffer. Honour ‘expired’ offers and promotions - it simply makes good business sense!
- Have a clear and well documented escalation process for customer concerns. Empower your customer service team to make decisions that will help to appease your customers. Proactively deal with things before they become a complaint!
- Be proactive when a problem occurs. Instead of sending out generic notifications when something goes wrong, contact the client directly via the phone or a personalized. Apologize sincerely and propose a solution to ‘make it right’.
Wow your customers, even when you make a mistake and can turn a problem and complaint into a real win for your business.
Post script: After all this, guess what happened next? Having complained via Twitter to HB about the poor service, they promised to get back to me and deal with the matter, but never did. About a week later I received a mystery package in the mail. Upon opening it, I uncovered a pair of designer underwear! Ones I hadn’t ordered, didn’t like and would never wear – plus one size to big. And to top it all off, no note of apology or explanation for why they sent it. How bizarre!
