No Excuses

I noted with some snarky amusement a story that appeared on one of the Gawker pages the other day, about a lapse in customer relations right out of a comedy sketch. It appears there is a start-up delivery service called Postmates that bills itself as being able to deliver anything you want from within the same city (San Francisco and London so far) that they are based in within a 1-hour window, and their satisfaction rate isn’t quite as good as they would like. A week or so ago a customer who was not satisfied with the service she received sent an email complaining about the issue to this company, whereupon it was escalated up the chain of command until the CEO received it. The CEO gave his people instructions for handling the case the way he wanted, and ended with the notation to his staff to also tell the customer to f*ck off. This would have passed unnoticed, except the CEO hit “reply all” and effectively copied the customer on this message…

This isn’t a new story, really; the basic idea has been around a lot longer than email. The Snopes.com urban legends site has version of this scenario – when a company screws up, sends a letter of apology, but fails to recognize that a note saying “send this guy the usual grovel” has been left attached to the letter – that go back for decades. It does seem particularly egregious when this sort of mistake is made by a web-based service company – a company which, in fact, exists for no other purpose than to provide a specific service to customers, and operates entirely online. It also seems remarkable that a company that owes its very existence to the rise of the Internet and email technologies still has people running it who don’t really understand how “reply all” works. The concept that the CEO in our story does know how his email works but was unable to use it properly would be even more daunting…

Now, this story isn’t an atrocity. The company did, in fact, come up with some solution that satisfied the customer, to the extent that when interviewed about this episode she said she accepted the CEO’s apology. Unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough to convince her that the expletive was either a joke or a typo, and it seems unlikely she will be using the service again. Shortly thereafter, the story got loose and now millions of scruffy bloggers are mocking Postmates in cities and countries where their service doesn’t even exist. It’s a completely preventable problem, and while the short-term effects should clear up after a single Internet news cycle (e.g. they already have), the long-term effects could still be devastating in areas like capital development (who is going to invest in a company that does things like this). And yet, that’s still not the worse customer service mistake we saw in the past week…

A story that ran in the (London) Daily Mail on the same day presented the case of a supermarket chain in the UK that managed to sell a Muslim family packaged foods that did not meet their dietary restrictions – which I’ve mentioned in earlier posts really is a vicious cultural insult – and then, as an apology offered the family a bottle of alcohol, which is also forbidden by their religion. One could argue that this was just a packaging mistake – and a blunder by a low-level customer service agent who was probably operating way above his or her pay grade – except that a similar mistake could get someone killed, if the mislabeled food is an allergen, and a company that feeds 11 million people each day should be able to afford managers and supervisors who have some understanding of their local customers…

In both cases, preventing the original problem was entirely within the company’s abilities, and fixing the situation after the fact (or at least keeping it from getting any worse) would have required better training, better supervision, and at least a hint of understanding why customers are important and why we can’t afford to lose all of them, but would have required very little actual work. Not taking that time, failing to train those people, and just using the same email conversation to handle everything may have saved time, or kept a few people from duties they found tedious, but the long-term costs could sink either of these companies. The sad truth is that, ultimately, both of these scenarios are actually cases of management failure, and the only way we’re ever going to stop such things from happening is to train better managers…