Ordering a rubbish skip should be a simple no-brainer. Unless of course the company lures you in by offering a special deal and then fails to deliver on its promise.

The ad on the radio sounded promising - order a skip for Anzac weekend and save $27 on usual price with Voucher Mate. I needed one anyway, so it was perfect (I thought). First step go to the website and order it there - enter all my details and go to the pricing page - no discount or facility to get my voucher discount. No worries, I’ll call them directly and it’ll all be sweet.

Firstly, the call quality was rubbish (appropriate), which didn’t help - I could barely hear them. The words “voucher mate” were either comprehended as Kitumbatu Swahili or, perhaps, familiar Kiwi “voucher - mate”. Whatever - they had no clue what I was talking about - so put me on hold and then dropped the call. I tried again - more time on hold - “could they take my details and ring me back tomorrow?” By that stage I’d had enough- called Skip Bins instead - in 2 minutes all sorted, no fuss and only eleven bucks more than “the deal”.

When a company’s processes aren’t coordinated between its marketing arms and customer channels it winds up creating customer dissatisfaction. I’d been a Skip Bins customer before and was willing to switch on “the deal” - but they won’t get me again.

Finally, did anyone think of testing? An employee could have acted as a “mystery shopper” and tried to order a bin with a voucher discount. That would have cost all of five minutes to ensure the promotion was working.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under Repetitive Failure, WOMBATS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.