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Home Delivery Turns Into a Snow Job | 12 comments (12 topical) | Post A Comment
This IS an IT issue[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#3)
by DavidFilmer on Tue Dec 19, 2006 at 04:14:23 PM PDT

I disagree that this article does not address an IT problem. Although the article deals with a consumer hardware buying experience, it reflects a serious failure of the back-end IT infrastructure. The consumer was sent a tracking number which did not exist (how was that e-mail generated in the first place?). The customer service reps could not locate the order (what happened to the inventory management system?). A second e-mail contained an apparently bogus tracking number but was properly cross-referenced to the consumer's telephone number (an oddity). Yet the phone number was apparently not passed to the shipping company.

These problems are all traceable to systems which don't communicate with each other. The only problem which cannot be traced directly to an IT failure was that the box was upside down. The level of human service was shoddy, but those guys were also hampered by the exact same IT failures that vexed the consumer (they also had the bogus tracking information, etc).

This experience has "bad IT" written all over it. And, unfortunately, the problems didn't manifest themselves in a server room, but in a customer's driveway.

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Oh, and for what it's worth...[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#4)
by DavidFilmer on Tue Dec 19, 2006 at 04:21:39 PM PDT

A few months ago I ordered a table saw accessory kit from Home Depot's website. The package just showed up one day (no customary e-mail telling me the order had been shipped, etc). I even checked my spam folder. Nothing.

But Home Depot DID send me the "your product has been shipped" e-mail. Four weeks later.

That, my friends, is ALSO an IT failure.

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Interesting[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#5)
by tcsbiz on Tue Dec 19, 2006 at 04:55:42 PM PDT

And when I ordered a refrigerator from Home Depot, it worked just fine from beginning to end. No I.T. failure then. So why would there be a failure on some orders but not all?

Tom.

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IT failures[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#6)
by jsimonson0 on Wed Dec 20, 2006 at 06:43:01 AM PDT

The very nature of IT failures after certain point is that they are inconsistent. Perhaps one shipping vendor upgraded a server in the EID environment. Perhaps an email or IP address has changed. Perhaps the mailbox was "full" when one message went through, but not the other, and the reporting feature is not monitored (staffing shortages, etc). The kicker here is, despite previous protestations, ever if this isn't an IT issue, it is a customer service issue. CS issues has been fair game here for years. We simply have more of them with IT products because the enforcement mechanisms aren't in place like they are with more durable goods.

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Man, I hate when I do this...[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#7)
by jsimonson0 on Wed Dec 20, 2006 at 06:44:04 AM PDT

That should be EDI, not EID...

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Mulitple failure points[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#9)
by tcsbiz on Wed Dec 20, 2006 at 04:08:31 PM PDT

I agree that there can be multiple failure points in these situations. How does Home Depot solve this? Even if the problem lies outside of Home Depot's control such as the shipping vendor, customers are still going to blame them because that's who they ordered from.

Tom.

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Great Article, i agreee with you[ Parent | Reply to This ] (none / 0) (#12)
by Anonymous User on Mon Sep 01, 2008 at 09:49:00 PM PDT

dis j'ai jamais vu de poisson sans ouies........et avec une forme pareille.......Internet Marketing 迷你倉 護膚 .

[ Parent | Reply to This ]


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