Bad service from an E-commerce Company

How has your Customer Experience been when shopping online?

Many people are already accustomed (like me) to shopping online for the various benefits that this service offers, such as:

• Convenience: buy from anywhere, avoid lines and trips, and receive your products directly at your home.
• Wide product catalog: greater variety of products, brands, and models than in a physical store, as well as exclusive products.
• Information: reviews, detailed descriptions, and opinions.
• Personalized recommendations.
• 24/7 availability.
• Flexibility: easy returns, exchanges, and order tracking.
• Price comparison: the best offers, discounts, promotions, and exclusive coupons online.

However, it is important to make sure you buy from reliable websites and protect your data. For this reason, I used to do most of my shopping on Amazon Operaciones Mexico .

What happened?

As an expert in Digital Transformation, I always used their success story until I started to notice several problems that arose when searching, purchasing, and/or returning products:

• In times of COVID-19, when searching for a face mask, things that were not at all related to what I was looking for often appeared in the search results. And this continues for any example you may have. Therefore, I realized that their processes and Data Governance were not well implemented, resulting in a bad customer experience.
• Many people/neighbors I know, complain that the App states that the product has already been delivered when it has not. Likewise, they have made a series of complaints where, after several days, they have not received it.
• When a return has to be made, the collection process is very strict and the same personnel who delivers another order cannot be used to take the return you have requested.

The last and most absurd thing I have found is that they do not honor offers and/or promotions. This happened to me when I bought a laptop, which I found at the best price available on the market. Amazon had it at an excellent price and with monthly payments without interest. I bought it on what in Mexico is the equivalent of “Black Friday” in the USA. But they charged my credit card after the promotions had ended (weird). Due to a typo I made in my last name, my bank rejected the purchase. I corrected the typo and contacted the Customer Service Center via chat to clarify this situation and they made the charge without any problem. It was done before 6 hours passed from the rejection. In the end, I confirmed with them if they would honor the payment terms, and told me that they would do it since the order had not been canceled and it was just an administrative error on my end. They also told me that if I had canceled the order, then the new price and payment conditions would apply.

I received the laptop within 2 days from that chat and I am very happy with it. However, when my credit card statement from my bank arrived, the charge was not reflected with the payment facilities that I had previously confirmed with Amazon's customer service center. Therefore, I contacted them and they said it was my bank's fault (which was not true because I had already noticed that the charge had not been made the same day I placed the order. I also spoke to the bank and they confirmed that they had not made any charge until sometime after the promotion had ended). For this reason, I asked to speak to the Amazon supervisor and she told me that they did not have any process available to resolve these cases. The only option they offered me was to return the product and make the purchase again (and therefore the price and payment conditions would be different). In the end, I decided to keep the laptop since I am still happy with it. I had to pay it without the facilities/promotion offered by Amazon with my credit card.

Conclusions

It is truly surprising how a company that has set the standards for online commerce globally fails to meet customer expectations. I have always said that the customer journey includes not only the “happy path”, but also the alternative processes where there is interaction with the customer, such as product questions, clarifications, returns, renewals, promotions, etc. All of this must be properly integrated (in an agile, simple, flexible, and innovative way) to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations. This is where even the big ones fail.

No matter how big or small your organization is, there will always be improvements to keep your customers happy. At https://dtstrategist.com, we offer any organization to review their culture, processes, and technology to create a specific strategy and roadmap for them with a customer-centric and data-driven approach, improving employees' life quality (innovating and being more efficient) enabled by the technology that best suits their needs.

#digitaltransformation #retail #customercentric #customerexperience #processengineering