Guru in a Bottle

Ardi Kolah

Ocado was a brand that had got many things right. Delivery, quality, reliability, and an obsession with the customer experience made it one of the most successful brands in the home delivery market in the UK.

But like all mega-brands, there are signs that its golden reputation is beginning to tarnish and this will start to have a negative impact on its reputation and ultimately it will lose sales.

Our fortnightly family order for groceries isn’t out of the ordinary. We’ve shopped on line with Ocado since its launch and by and large have had a good customer experience. Navigating a supermarket with two young children on weekly basis isn’t a viable option so Ocado’s delivery service met our rational as well as emotional needs for feeding our hungry family. The online order was placed for home delivery on the 19 March.

First signs of trouble was that the van driver was 45 minutes late. I’d had to put in a series of calls to Ocado Customer Services to find out what was going on as we were left in the dark and uncharacteristically hadn’t been called by Ocado or its driver.

We just managed to get dinner out of the way and the children in bed before the van eventually turned up at 7.45pm. After the driver had left, I noticed that the rye bread sell-by date was 20 March! I know bread is perishable –but I hadn’t anticipated consuming the bread within 24 hours! There must be some mistake?

Normally, if there’s a problem like this, a quick email to Customer Services gets a refund and even a replacement product free of charge.

My email to Ocado Customer Services read:

We eventually got delivery of the shopping only to find that the rye bread expires in 24 hours! This is not what we expect so please can you refund the cost of this item. Thanks

Mid-day the following day, I received the following self-congratulatory email from Ocado Customer Services that made me see red:

Dear Mr Kolah,

Thank you for your recent e-mail.

Ocado prides itself on delivering produce of the highest quality so it concerns me that you were not satisfied with the life of the Buckingham Sliced Rye from your recent order. I would therefore like to take this opportunity to explain how our webshop life guarantee works:

Every product in our Fulfilment Centre has been computer tagged and tracked throughout the entire distribution chain. We do this to ensure we pick and deliver items in the freshest condition and of the highest quality.

For your reference, the webshop also displays a guaranteed life for all products, as well as the average life based on the previous week’s deliveries. This information is intended to help you plan meals more efficiently, and reduce food wastage.

The life with customer guarantee that is shown on our website before an order is placed means that we do have products in our warehouse that will give the customer up to the number of days shown. However, the system does not know when the customer will want to have their shopping delivered. After the customer has placed their order, the life with customer will vary accordingly.

After having investigated the matter, I have found that the Buckingham Sliced Rye you mentioned as having a short life was in fact delivered with an acceptable period of time before the use-by date.

I do hope that my explanation has addressed your concerns. Please be assured that your comments will be passed to the relevant department, as we are always looking at ways we can improve our service.

If we can be of any further help, or you have any further comments or suggestions, then please contact us by e-mailing ocado@ocado.com, or by calling us on 0845 3991122 or 0845 6561234 (8am-11pm Mon to Sat, 12-8pm Sun), seven days a week.

Yours sincerely,

Anna Maidment
Ocado Customer Service Team

I wondered - leaving aside how Ocado deals with customer complaints by starting off in a self congratulatory way about its wonderful customer service - why a loaf of rye bread would need to be consumed within 24 hours or thrown away represented an “acceptable period of time before the use by date”. It may be acceptable for Ocado from a P&L perspective but it certainly didn’t sound like they had our interests at heart.

My follow-up email to Ocado Customer Services read:

Dear Ms Maidment

Thanks for the cut n paste response, which was interesting.

However, please explain why a rye bread product with a Sell By date of 20/3/09 and delivered on 19/3/09 complies with the stated 'acceptable period of time before the use by date'?

Surely Ocado can't assume all products delivered - including perishable items such as bread - will be consumed within 24 hours of receiving them. I have bought rye bread from the shops and never had to consume it within such a short sell by date - so why is Ocado any different?

Obviously your response has slightly dented my impression of the Ocado brand. Perhaps passing on my comments to the PR department may evince a different kind of response.

At a minimum I expect a refund - and an explanation to the points raised above. Yours sincerely”

Not wanting to leave it at that, and interested to see how the complaint will be dealt with when escalated to the Customer Services Manager, I called Ocado as invited by Ms Maidment.

I then got through to another customer service call handler who agreed with me that the whole incident hadn’t been handled in an unacceptable way and that he would personally speak to the Customer Services Manager. Eventually I receive an email from the Customer Services Manager that a refund for the loaf of bread would be made.

But the damage to the Ocado brand and my confidence in it had already been affected.

This story illustrates some simple home truths.

If the customer takes the trouble to call and then follow up a complaint –and is met with a standard cut n’ paste response – then the brand owner can’t expect to create a positive perception or to be taken seriously in its claims for delivering excellent customer service.

When the brand owner states that the complaint has been “investigated” and this leads to an illogical outcome, this simply shakes any residual faith that may be left with the customer for the matter to be resolved satisfactorily and ultimately damages the reputation of the brand.

And trying to shift the blame to other areas of the operation for the inaccuracy of information fed to the customer is also irrelevant. Ocado has chosen Customer Services as the key contact point between itself and its customers, so how a complaint is handled on the telephone in a business which never actually meets its customers carries a higher level of expectation that it will be done well compared with other businesses that can communicate face to face.

The net result is that we’ll now think twice before ordering perishable items from Ocado and readers of this column now have a different impression of the Ocado brand.

So was it really in Ocado’s best interest to dispute a complaint over the price of a loaf when weighed against the long term damage to goodwill and reputation?

Ardi is CEO of Guru in a Bottle, a no fuss sales & marketing and training company. He can be reached on ardi@guruinabottle.com or visit www.guruinabottle.com