John Gibbard

In the world of customer experience, there are certain topics and industry sectors which, if you’re looking for examples of terrible customer service, are like shooting fish in a barrel. Consider, for example, the courier company.

It’s not a trivial thing, every single graph one finds when searching for online shopping shows a precipitous upward curve. We’re all doing it and as a fundamental part of our relationship with brands, it’s a curious thing that something so critical to the customer journey is outsourced to external companies – often at the lowest possible price.

The trouble is, it’s so often the point of the user experience that is most broken. eCommerce retailers have woken up and begun to spend big sums on the optimisation of their digital interaction design. They’re talking choice architecture, multi-variate testing, ethnography, eye-tracking and so on and so on. All very noble, but once we’ve slipped down their wide-necked and increasingly-greasy conversion funnel we’re left at the mercy of the cowboys they have contracted to send us our products.

Many of us are now experiencing that sinking feeling when the confirmation email drops into our box and proudly announces that [insert courier company here] are going to be delivering the purchase. Today on Twitter the comedian Richard Herring began tweeting his experiences of Yodel’s service. It opened a rich vein of commentary on the company’s undeniably appalling fulfilment of orders. Amongst the numerous comical and fantastical examples of their failures, a few posts stood out [ Why I’m boycotting Yodel and Yodel are an incompetent shower ]. It’s quite apparent that customers are now sufficiently motivated by the toxicity of their previous experiences with companies like Yodel, to take this out on the original vendor/provider.

From Terence Eden

Well, the solution’s simple – from now on I don’t accept deliveries from Yodel.

If I buy something and I receive a Yodel tracking ID, I’m cancelling the order.
If a Yodel driver turns up, I’ll refuse to accept delivery.

In short, I am firing them – and I suggest you do the same.

In simple terms, customers will actually refuse to purchase from you if they know you’re using a courier who has failed them in the past.

This attribution of responsibility, the guilt by association or the sheer unwillingness to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous delivery companies, anecdotally at least, is an opportunity for eTailers. Consider the benefit of giving customers the confidence that their shipping fee will be going to a highly-rated and ultra-low-failure-rate delivery company? Imagine that your customer can have complete confidence – underwritten by you as vendor – that their parcel will arrive safely, in good time.

If we as experience-obsessed strategists, are mapping and considering the service from end to end, we must insist that significant time and attention is paid to all touch points, including those that businesses choose to outsource (for perfectly legitimate reasons) and that the same care and attention to exceptional user experience is applied to those moments. The critical moment of delivery is too valuable to leave to the cold moneyed hand of procurement decision makers writing contracts with universally-derided delivery partners.

And, if you’re a courier company, perhaps using your twitter feed to merrily announce competition winners while disgruntled customers pick up the pieces (often literally) of your failed service, might not be the most sensible strategy…

UPDATE Richard Herring’s Metro piece on the failed delivery is a good read

Companies that use Yodel

UPDATE: After an atrocious delivery experience from ELC/Mothercare I have decided to produce a table showing retailers that use Yodel for their service to avoid them on that basis (other tables exist on MSE and Mumsnet but are out of date)

Mothercare & Early Learning Centre (July 2016) – Will no longer use at-home delivery
Great Little Trading Company – (July 2016) – Will no longer use whilst they contract Yodel