I placed an online order with Kensington a week or so ago and one of the items I ordered was back-ordered. They sent me an e-mail to let me know this, giving me the option to cancel the order. At this point, I was thought they were pretty on the ball.
Today I ended up needing to cancel the order and that’s when I ran into trouble.
- There should have been an initial indication that the item I was ordering was back-ordered, that would have avoided this entire situation.
- The e-mail said “reply to this e-mail at cancellations@example.com if you want to cancel…”, but the e-mail was sent from (and with a reply-to address of) service@example.com.
- I decided to send my cancellation request to both addresses to be safe, and both addresses bounced!
- Then I called the phone number included in the e-mail. I got the standard IVR menu and choose the 5th option ‘…about an online store order…’. The lady I spoke with there told me that I had to call a different number because she couldn’t do anything with online orders.
- Finally, I got through to someone who could cancel the order at the number she gave me and cancelled it.
Each of these things individually are no big deal, but when you put them all together they are the very picture of avoidable problems. How hard is it to put the right e-mail address and phone number in a canned e-mail? Or just enable a few extra e-mail addresses? Or add an option in the IVR to handle web order service? 
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Bryan Villarin adds this Comment:
Thanks for posting this. It’s good for people to hear things that annoy them, so hopefully companies will learn and fix their mistakes. The little things add up to a big deal.
February 15th, 2005 at 1:47 pm
Steve Eyre adds this Comment:
I often believe it isn’t just a problem these companies have - its almost as if they are forcing you to have a hard time in order to cancel their orders. While they may be breaking no laws, since you most definitely can cancel your order, they put it in such a difficult place, that they might hope an average customer might not have the time to go trough with the stress of cancelling, therefore holding on to your money. Or maybe, I’m just paranoid!
February 15th, 2005 at 2:43 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
That may be the case in some situations, but I don’t believe that is what is happening here.
February 15th, 2005 at 3:35 pm
Ajay adds this Comment:
I know what this feels like. I can’t stop cursing a lot of companies and vendors I need to deal with simply because of their inefficiency!
BTW: Where do I find all the smileys you have?
February 16th, 2005 at 4:53 am
alexking.org: Blog adds this Trackback:
How to Lose Customers
Perhaps I spoke too quickly in defending Kensington in the comments of my previous post. I got an e-mail confirmation that my order was cancelled, then a day later I got an shipment notification e-mail on the cancelled order. Sure enough, the product s…
February 23rd, 2005 at 4:53 pm