Make Sure Your Systems Talk

A few weeks ago, I ordered a couple of shirts from a new “hip” brand.  I put hip in quotation marks because that is the last thing I am.  Their marketing worked on me.  My shirts shipped for “free.”  “Free” shipping has a cost and apparently the company used a discount shipper to try to mitigate that cost.  My package supposedly shipped from a facility that is not too far from me and took 13 days to arrive from the time I received a email saying the package shipped.  During that time period, I received a message saying my package arrived.  It appeared to be an automated email based on estimated delivery time.  I also received numerous emails asking me to rate my order.  I attempted to contact the company and received an AI bot response that someone would reach out to me.  No one ever did.

It appears the company uses several systems that did not talk to each other.  My guess is their shipping system assumes a package ships when a label is generated and they did not have inventory or my package got stuck somewhere internally.  I highly doubt it was in transit for 13 days.  In the meantime, their marketing system thought it shipped and had a default trigger that asked the recipient to rate the order after a certain time.  All of that automation is great when it works.  When it doesn’t, the result is an irritated customer.  

Integrating systems is costly, challenging, and necessary.  Acquiring customers is very costly.  Do the work on your systems or your company will not keep that customer.