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Replying To:
This IS an IT issue[ Parent ] (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.

[ Parent ]


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