The curious customer service case of Asda Home Shopping

And further down the rabbit hole we go!

Readers of yesterday's blog post will know that Asda Home Shopping has a bit to learn about customer service. But the latest developments indicate that its customer service problems are far more serious than first feared.

Having vented my spleen in yesterday's blog and still waiting to be contacted to reschedule my delivery, as advised I would be by the contact centre, my impatience got the best of me and I proceeded to see how far I could get under my own steam.

Despite my better instincts, I first opted to use the Home Shopping online helper - Ask Amy.

Asking Amy where your shopping is prompts her to push you to the same customer service number that I spent 45 minutes queueing in yesterday. No thanks Amy.

"I don't want to call that number. Is there an alternative contact point?" I typed. Her response? "I don't understand that question, try one of the popular FAQs to the right". Dead end. Denied by a cyber worker in a green arran wool sweater.

What about Twitter? Amy hadn't heard of Twitter, but I had given Asda's page a glance while stuck in the call centre queue only to be discouraged by post after post about special offers and the latest OK! Magazine. It didn't appear to be an interaction tool, but I tweeted a cry for help nonetheless.

Success!

But this Twitter team couldn't help. That's the job of their other Twitter handle, I was told - @asdaserviceteam. Buoyed by this meagre progress I clicked on the new handle - only to find it no longer existed. How could they not know that their customer service Twitter profile was inactive!?!?!

I messaged @asda back and was advised to DM my order number to them which would be forwarded to the customer services team. The same customer services team I had been waiting all day to hear from to reschedule my delivery. The same customer services team that were supposed to have informed me that there was a problem with my delivery in the first place. Does Amy run this team?

So it was with some shock that yesterday evening I received a call from Asda. Progress! Were they calling to reschedule my delivery following my contact centre call? No. Were they responding to my help query on the site? No. Were they responding to my tweet? No. They were responding to my blog - which had been picked up by their 'social media monitoring team'. 

And the gentleman in question wasn't even in the elusive customer services team. He just happened to be the most senior person on watch at that time of night to deliver a 'holding call' until tomorrow when - he assured me - the mystical customer services team would call. He couldn't reschedule the delivery because he wasn't in the Home Shopping department. He couldn't call the Home Shopping department. And there weren't enough staff on the shop floor at the local store to pull the grocery list together for me to collect myself. But he was a very nice man.

All of this begs another question. What about the other customers who had experienced problems with their deliveries (and according to the contact centre, they had been inundated with calls from them, hence the loooong queue). What about those customers that hadn't blogged? Were they also getting a 'holding call'? No. I was told they weren't.

A few things for Asda to think about in future - and for us all to consider in our own business. Does somebody have ownership of your customer service? Nobody I have spoken to at Asda has had a clue of who is actually responsible for this debacle. Nobody is escalating this service case. Nobody is driving a resolution.

And this brings me on to a second question for Asda - are you satisfied that your staff are empowered to make decisions to resolve customer issues? Because all of the staff I have spoken to have been perfectly nice, but completely unable to address my problem. It's just being passed from place to place.

The simple fact is that human staff don't have to have the same limitations as automated Amy.

The next post in this series can be viewed here.