Category: Customer service

Land mines in the “last mile”

Telephone companies, cable operators and such refer to the “last mile” as the final step of actually getting their service into a home or office. For marketing companies, the “last mile” is the process of actually delivering the product or service to the customer—and that’s where more and more companies fall short, perhaps intentionally.

Infoweek columnist Chad Dickerson describes a situation in which a hotel reservation was not honored because the “last mile” procedure of the online booking company was to send a fax to the participating hotel, where it was ignored. My wife had the experience of ordering expensive curtains from a company called Smith and Noble, whose “last mile” procedure when a customer complains about a missing order is to send an email to the factory and hope they respond. (This outfit couldn’t even CANCEL an order efficiently; when they still hadn’t delivered the drapes for our little vacation cabin on the next-to-last day of our stay, she was assured the order would be shipped that night overnight or not at all. Neither promise turned out to be true; our friendly neighbor signed for the package a few days later and the curtains now sit uselessly in a closet. Sure hope they fit when we show up next year…)

As to intentional disappointments, this is what happens when a company looks for ways to cut costs and finds that it can save big by lowering expectations or simply failing to meet them for the small percentage of orders that are more expensive to fulfill. This is happening now at my beloved Amazon.com, whose “Prime Shipping”—two-day shipping at no extra cost beyond a yearly fee, and overnight shipping for $3.99—is I predict destined to be a one-season wonder.

When Amazon consistently failed to get a Prime order to me in 2 days, AND email customer service failed to reach a solution or adequately explain the problem, I wrote a detailed letter to Jeff Bezos. (As a practice this is what I recommend as a final step to get a resolution from a company; if the CEO (or someone else with responsibility) fails to respond or sends you a form letter, that tells you as much as if they fixed the problem.)

In my case I got a personal response from a personal representative of Jeff’s, but she got both the shipping date and the item description wrong—data that was readily available in Amazon’s own files, of course. Trouble in the last mile which presages more disappointments down the road…

What’s wrong with the post office?

I am the world’s biggest cheapskate, yet on more than one recent occasion I stepped out of a line at the Post Office and drove across town to UPS to ship the package for three times the cost with slower delivery. I see other people doing the same thing. They arrive, look at the line, shake their head and leave.

What’s wrong with the post office? Why can’t they just take our money and mail our stuff since that, after all, is that they’re there for?

Part of the problem is that the USPS has become the shipper of last resort. Nobody is simply buying stamps. Everybody is shipping a poorly wrapped package to some mysterious place, and fluid is leaking out, and they want insurance, and the clerk tells them to rewrap the package and get back in line. (At the HEAD of the line, so even if you’ve worked your way up to the front you’re not sure you really have.)

And that’s not even the biggest problem.

Everybody’s started using Priority Mail which seems sort of like blackmail, paying extra to insure your package will arrive when it’s supposed to. So, now the post office has started selling something called “Priority Bundles”. If you say you want to ship Priority, they ask you if you would like proof of delivery, or insurance, or a signature at extra cost. Of course, it takes a lot of time to explain these options and still more time to do the paperwork. And the line grows longer.

I can see the USPS’ logic: their clerks and customers are there anyway, so selling the extra services provides pure profit. But they disregarded the opportunity cost which is so great that other customers abandon the post office… perhaps permanently.

Much of my business depends on reliable of transmission of lots of mail, so this kind of thing makes me nervous. I’m reminded of what the new Postmaster General said in Canada a few years back when he was asked some question about direct mail advertising and reliability. I’m assuming this guy was a political appointee and had not read his briefing book. He said something to the effect of “that’s ridiculous, nobody would ever had a business that depended on the post office”. Right.

“Print your boarding pass here!”

There are plenty of little internet shops that charge $2.50 for 15 minutes of access and 25 cents for a copy, but French Quarter Computer Services had the inspiration to bundle them to create a product. A textbook case of turning a service into a benefit that solves a simple but serious problem… you can now retrieve your boarding pass online in your hotel, but how do you get it onto paper to give to the airline? Their window sign stopped me in my tracks.

If you are ever in New Orleans, give these folks some business. They are at 824 Chartres, 504-525-4660.