- The trigger
- A recurring bad customer experience
- How could such a failed customer experience have been avoided?
Shopping online and picking up your groceries in Drive offers time savings and personal comfort, avoiding the need to spend time in the aisles of large supermarkets. However, upon arriving at the store, the consumer may have unpleasant surprises and end up with products that are out of stock in their initial order.
This bad customer experience can then give a feeling of dissatisfaction to the consumer as well as a bad brand image leading inevitably to a deterioration of the brand's reputation and, consequently, of its sales.
My name is Emmanuel Kouratoras and a few weeks ago a famous supermarket sign discouraged me from ordering in their drive for a while.
This is not about settling personal scores or suing a brand, but rather about honestly talking about a failed user experience in the world of mass retailing that leads to the question: how could such a failed customer experience have been avoided?
The trigger
On May 17th, a few days after the deconfinement, I place an online order for my food shopping for the week. The next day, I pick up my DRIVE order to save time in my schedule.
My drive ticket is without surprise more than 110 euros to last a week. I finally arrive at the parking lot of the sign at the time I had been indicated to pick up my order. On arriving at the reception desk, a Drive employee greets me and with a compassionate look says to me:
"Well... I'm sorry sir, we have 14 shortages on your order, we were able to offer you replacement products for 5 products, but for the others, we have no more stock.”
This very professional and empathetic employee says to me:
"I suggest that you go and get other products from the shelves yourself if you want to add to your order.”
I tell him that it won't be necessary, accept the replacements of the 5 ruptures and leave annoyed, but above all with a feeling of dissatisfaction difficult to put aside because it turns out that the products in ruptures were products that I fell in love with (ex: organic chestnut rusk).
A recurring bad customer experience
Reading my testimony, one could say that after all it was only a bad experience, due to the exceptional nature of the current health situation or perhaps a computer breakdown.
In reality, this sign got me used to a bad customer experience before this incident, during and after the containment.
Indeed, it offers a wide online catalog and very flexible time slots, but 4 out of 5 orders show at least 2 breakdowns.
As a customer, I therefore prefer to order my groceries from another retailer with whom I have never had any disappointments when I retrieve the order. The downside is that their online catalog is smaller and their collection slots are fewer, which leads me to juggle between these two retailers without really having a satisfying customer experience.
How could such a failed customer experience have been avoided?
One of the many challenges in retail or mass distribution is to make sure you have the right product in the right place to ensure the right customer experience online, in store and on the drive.
Nevertheless, many retailers focus their attention on the availability of best sellers. This may sound intuitive, of course, because it's the products that make up a big part of the turnover, the famous 20/80 of good old Pareto.
However, when products with low turnover have a more limited impact on sales figures, their unavailability can be extremely devastating for customer satisfaction and, in this way, create a negative impact on sales in the long term. In my case, this retailer is seeing me go from a recurring customer to a very occasional customer.
Innovation is therefore a key element in helping people make the right decision and optimize the customer experience. All the more so in brands with more than 300 stores and more than 150,000 references, where decision-making is highly complex.
A McKinsey study recommends investing in data and technology to ensure an exceptional customer experience in such a dynamic environment. These investments should help anticipate and predict customer expectations.
