Maplin - Useless Service

I ordered a fly-killer from Maplins yesterday. The sort that has UV light and electrocutes the flies. Good reviews on the site for a model that was on special offer.

I decided that by the time I need a new bulb I might have trouble sourcing it, so I also bought two spare bulbs. We have a fly problem at present (that's why I am buying it, doh!) so instead of accepting the free delivery of 3-5 days I paid extra for next day delivery.

I got an automated email later on (15:11) from PayPal saying that my credit card had been credited - for the amount of the fly killer. I checked the order confirmation email (received just after I placed the order at 08:48) in case I had put two by mistake into my basket ... nope. So I sent an email to their customer service alerting them to the fact that I hoped they weren't crediting me a fly killer, and just sending the bulbs that would be useless, and telling them that I had received no communication other than the refund notice from PayPal - maybe an operator had wrongly credited me ... etc.

Next email was an automated response to my customer service email (17:44) saying that they aim to respond to emails within 72 hours - What use is that? If I phone they will answer immediately, which means that have to tool up a call centre for that, but EMails they will do with significant delay, even though Email doesn't require them to handle them immediately and is much easier to tool up for?

Delivery confirmation automated email arrived at 21:04, listing both the fly killer and spare bulbs as despatched - at least they are on there way, we can sort out the money thing later ...

Another automated email at 22:23 confirming the "despatch information". Yeah, you guessed it. Bulbs sent next day courier super urgent, fly killer model "discontinued"

How incredibly useless is that? I will now get delivery, today, of bulbs that I cannot use for anything, have paid a disproportionate amount for carriage for, and most importantly the thing that WAS urgent for me to receive, the fly killer, they have silently removed from my order and not shipped.

How come the operator didn't take into account that I had paid extra for Next Day shipping? Maplin sell other models of fly killer, a quick call / email and I could have changed to a different one (OK not on special offer, but I would have had the choice ...)

More to the point, how come a huge organisation like Maplin with a sophisticated eCommerce website doesn't have stock control integration so that things are removed from their website when they go out of stock? and delivery staff trained to use some initiative if they run out of stock on something. Not to mention emails saying they have shipped goods that they haven't. Maplin will now have all the cost of sorting this out - they can come and collect the useless bulbs and refund me for the cost of them, and the carriage I paid, not to mention the loss of goodwill mucking me about.

 

Not sure what you expected? No offence, but when you can just pop out and buy something that will always be preferable to eCommerce. It just doesn't work on a large scale.
Sadly the geeks who design the systems lack the basic common sense to design a system to replace human beings.
Too many of the chains are concentrating on eCommerce at the expense of staff with access to quality IT. In the motor industry we are badly affected by the wholesale use of automated stock control systems. This extends from the manufacturers down to the small local motor factors. The number of cars that I'm storing due to back ordered parts is now stupid and we will now be following the lead of other garages and charging a daily storage fee.

 

How? They're not involved in the process other than picking, packing and getting it there. The IT side and its inability to make a human connection is at fault surely. Far too easy to blame someone on minimum wage I think - far more at fault is the seventy grand a year (and upwards) IT director, and their accountants who are setting the stock parameters.
I'm also sure that if you read the small print when you ordered Maplins reserved the right to mess you about like this!!

 

I'm going there in a minute to try to get a refund

 

Me too! ^^ well an exchange...

 

I build eCommerce systems for a living, we have clients with 100 high street stores and Click and Collect on our website, they have more than 100 people in their call centre at busy times of the year and I expect that Maplin is a similar order of magnitude ...

... I am sure cockups can happen for our clients too, but this cockup would not have happened in this way.

The refund was issued manually (its got the operator's name on it in Paypal), so there was opportunity for them to do a proper job at that point. I doubt refunds is an Office Junior responsibility (too much opportunity for fraud by staff unless they are trained & trusted)

I've heard my client's call centre staff dealing with customer problems. Once example that sticks in my mind is when we had heavy winter snow a few years ago and the courier they used was swamped with parcels at their distribution centre in the Midlands and the operator was talking to a customer who hadn't had his parcel delivered. The call centre operator could see on her screen that the parcel was stuck in that distribution centre, obviously had no idea when it might be released, so was trying to explain to the customer that they would ship another, via a different courier who had no distribution overload problems in that part of the country, and she seemed to be having trouble getting the customer to understand that he would not be charged for the replacement item and that the issue of getting the original one back again could be solved later at the supplier's expense but the important thing was to get him the goods he needed.

So, yeah, I do have an expectation that call centres don't have to be lowest-common-denominator. Bad news about bad service travels fast and once out there is impossible to undo ... here I am tell all you folk, for example and already, in our small community, we have other people replying that they are busy getting refunds / replacements at this moment in time.

 

Hence my no offence bit.

You would probably not be surprised. My other half works for a company that supply services to small to large companies (including the largest chains in the land). Her job is to carry out a rolling audit to ensure that the "books figure" matches the bank statements. The company has an annual sales figure of £90,000,000 or thereabouts with monthly invoices ranging from a couple of hundred through to tens of thousands. Credits of up to £1000 are single click operations handled by the latest temp or trained monkey, up to £10000 single click by the longer term clerks and above that double clicked by the dept.manager. Any credits that do not match the original invoice value (up or down) need secondary authority. She is notified by way of a daily credit note/payment report except for the larger ones where she and the relevant dept.manager receive instant notification.
As all systems (I presume) have an original sales and original account requirement and should operate some sort of up to date reporting there is no need for the task to be carried out by anyone other than a data entry clerk.

Regarding my "geek" comment I speak from experience as my stepson is one of those geeks. Having recently sat in on a trial run of a system that they were building I picked up on ten issues regarding user friendliness in less than an hour. His employer (an old drinking friend of mine from way back) offered to pay me to do similar future work for them, but I just told him to employ a semi retired person to sit in instead. Brainstorming ideas is all well and good, but it tends to take place with like minded individuals. They need to throw in more variables in terms of mindset.

I'm not anti IT, just find very few instances where it improves service. It does however improve the bottom line.

 

We do very little eCommerce these day. All the projects have been taken over by Marketing departments, where they used to be IT, so now it is all about pixel-perfect design, and when we point out that the shopping experience is rubbish / doesn't work its very hard to get any traction at all; in the old days there was lots of effort on project management, delivering on time and in budget, and proper testing. Nowadays every marketing bod want's their site to be different / unique and all that jazz. Meantime Amazon carry on with their rather uninspiringly bland, but familiar, site - and I am sure that companies that mimic Amazon's layout get fewer abandoned baskets as a result.

On our big systems we used to get 50% abandoned baskets (which, even back then, was regarded as nothing short of a miracle!) but those same clients, now in the hands of their marketing departments, are now happy with 90% abandoned ...