In the early hours of Wednesday 6th of January 2010 I placed an order with Marks & Spencer for 16 items of clothing, via their website. In order to keep delivery simple, I opted to “nominate” the following Saturday for receipt of the goods, even though it wasn’t the earliest possible date; at that time, the country was struggling with snow and I thought that it might be best to allow a few extra days for M&S to plan the delivery.
As per usual, I received an email almost immediately, confirming that I had placed the order. It also informed me that the order would be split into two deliveries but that both were still due for delivery on my nominated date. Although we had practically zero snow on the ground in our corner of Central London, the media and my colleagues assured me that the rest of the country was covered with the stuff so I wasn’t too surprised when, come Saturday, just the one package arrived, containing a single item. Disappointing but I was sure that the rest would eventually arrive, once the snow cleared up.
Four days later and still nothing (except more snow). And then two emails pop innocently into my inbox:
We are sorry let you know that the following item/s you ordered are no longer available.
…
Unfortunately, due to an exceptionally high number of orders placed at the same time, some popular items have sold out and we do apologise for any disappointment and inconvenience this has caused.
The out of stock items have been removed from your order and you have not been charged for them. All remaining available items can be viewed in your online account.
And yet I’ve just been on the site and ALL BUT ONE of these items is still available to order and listed as in stock in my size – in fact, for many of them the site goes so far as to reassure me that they have MORE THAN 10 of them.
It would seem that even though we’re supposedly in a recession, Marks & Spencer can afford to turn down business on a whim with barely an apology for wasting my time. Hardly the actions of a company that values their customers.
UPDATE: Re-reading this post, I realise that I left out a crucial piece of information – the items being cancelled were all 15 of the outstanding items. Although M&S were very apologetic – they even sent me a bunch of flowers! – when I called Customer Services to arrange for the order to be resubmited, I was initially told that I would need to provide the size and colour information for each item (miraculously that data became available when I refused). During a second call (which was made in response to my tweets) there was initially no record of the previous call and re-submitted order, which almost lead to a duplicate re-submission… So, although 1 blog post, several tweets and 3 phone calls (1 from me, 2 from M&S) later, my order finally arrived (13 days after I had first placed it), overall the experience was still a major #FAIL.
