Blog

Online personal touch can prove as elusive as finding boat sneakers in the fall

The personal experience can be missing at even the most tenured ecommerce retailers as a search for white sneakers reveals.

September 23, 2015 by Judy Mottl — Editor, RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com

This week our coverage focuses on creating, crafting and developing a "personal" customer experience and the great insight from two experts hit home with a personal online shopping experience I had.

Here’s the scenario: My 94-year-old father is on a quest to find simple pull-on white sneakers with no laces or Velcro straps. He needs a wide width, but the big hurdle is he’s looking for white sneakers, which are rarely on a retail shelf past mid July due to seasonal inventory change.

But I didn’t let those challenges daunt me. After all I’ve found everything and anything I’ve ever needed online at some point and often at price points that proved thrilling as long as I was patient.

So I hit the web. I started with Google searches but didn’t achieve expected success given the parameters of sizing, width and color. White sneakers pulled in thousands of options; pull-on white sneakers in 11 E not so much.

Then it became a matter of zeroing in on specific footwear sites — and I started with those I figured would like have the biggest inventory and most options starting with Payless.com. I have to admit it is one of my favorite retailers given its BOGO deals and free delivery to stores (which is nice with three kids whose feet grew every other day for 10 years). It’s just always been a good customer experience since the site launched.

But, as my mother often reminded me, all good things come to an end and so did my streak at Payless.

The good news is that I actually found the sneaker. But when I went to check out I kept getting an error message that the "service" was not operating and that I needed to call customer service. That’s not very personal or nice. But glitches happen and I figured I’d just log in the next day and hopefully complete the transaction.

The kicker though came the next day when I got an email from Payless reminding me my cart had an item in it and pretty much asking didn’t I want to complete my purchase! Of course I did, but I couldn’t respond as the email alert was a no-address response version. Not very personal.

Then, to boot, (pun intended) I log into the site later that day to complete the purchase and the sneakers were no longer in my cart. No explanation whatsoever. Not very personal.

I took all of this as one big omen and just explained to my dad that September is not the time of year to look for summertime sailing-type of sneakers and we just let go of the dream for the next six months.

About Judy Mottl

---

Judy Mottl is editor of Retail Customer Experience and Digital Signage Today. She has decades of experience as a reporter, writer and editor covering technology and business for top media including AOL, InformationWeek, InternetNews and Food Truck Operator.

Connect with Judy: