You had one job!

(What bad on-line service looks like)

One of he things you do when you live alone in the Middle East is ordering your food on-line. You do that a lot, really, because it is convenient and generally not very expensive for Ok food. In Dubai I used to use Foodonclick a lot and never had a problem with their service, unfortunately they are not present in Muscat where you only have Talabat and the least you can say is that the service is far from the one you would have in Dubai.

For those who do not know the system, it is quite simple they both are a platform where restaurant can put their menu and get the order while leaving a little commission to the web site/app company. Simple. If you have a problem with the order you contact the call center, via phone or chat on the site. Again simple … Well, it should be, because, well, it’s not.

Over 3 weeks I had 3 bad experiences: 2 times the orders took more than 2 hours to arrive and last time just received 2.5 OMR back for an order of 6.4 OMR because the delivery guy … had no change on 10 OMR. That is 1.1 OMR of “tip” without choosing to tip … that is 2.5 euros for those who are not familiar with Omani Riyals.

Muscat is a pretty laid back city and sometimes the service can be a bit “cool” so you don’t mind too much, but when it happens every time with the same service you begin to have less patience and so you contact the customer service … and if it get worse, well that begins to be slightly too much.

There are 3 basic problems with the service provided by Talabat and they illustrate exactly what bad service looks like:

1. They don’t enforce the respect of the customer with their partners
2. Their customer service follows a script and nothing else but the script
3. They don’t try to fix the problem, they try to find a person responsible and it is generally not them.

Problem 1 — Enforce reliability

You are partnering with restaurants, they probably sign a contract with you about the level of service you require form them, and in that contract you probably have “respect your delivery time” and “don’t take money from your customer”. It is not normal that orders are taking more 1 hour to arrive, and if they do as it can happen you inform your customer of the real situation. It is not normal that the delivery guys never have the change, it shows they all know the trick to get a bit more tip and that you do nothing about it. And sorry buddy but if someone is taking more money from me than I’m supposed to give without my consent I call that a crook.

If you don’t force your partners to be reliable then you are not reliable, if you are not reliable I’m not using your services.

Problem 2 — Talk to your customer, really

All call centres have scripts, we all know that, but if the only answers we have are from the scrip and nothing else we have the impression of talking to robots and not human and it is not saving problem: it generates even more frustration. Below an example of the chat with the customer service, over more than 1 hour: surreal!

The only explanation for a chat like this is: they did not even contact the restaurant, never, at no moment at all. They might have checked the system to see if the order was there then calculate the time but nobody called the restaurant.

A week later after another order I had exactly the same but worse: the operator tells he has contacted the restaurant and the order is on its way less than 2 minutes after the inquiry. It is really not complicated to guess he did not check and just answers following the script. Once he has done it we keep on receiving these automated messages saying they will be right with me. Hello Robot! Even when you ask them politely to contact the restaurant, they answer they already did and the order is on its way and when this has been going on for 20 minutes they still say it should be there in 10 minutes. In the end I called the restaurant directly who said they had received the order after 1 hour, so at the moment the customer service was telling me it was on its way and it took 2 hours and 15 minutes to finally get my food.

I posted a tweet about the change issue with my last order, automated tweet answer, answered in DM, same automated tweet answer, and finally a message telling me they want to solve the situation with the restaurant manager. I had posted a message on the Facebook page, guess what … they do not allow posts before being reviewed by the management so complains never get published. How convenient!

If you open the conversation your customer then you answer, if you don’t answer I’m not using your services.

Problem 3 — Fix the problem!

All I could have from both Talabat is an answer that the restaurant was wrong and they would have to compensate me. I spent 15 minutes on the phone with a customer service operator that was just repeating over and over again he could not do anything else than be sorry and blame the restaurant. The problem does not come from the restaurant if the situation is happening with all of them, it comes from you not making sure the service is up to standards.

That is exactly how you do bad service on-line: you don’t care about the customer because in the end you’re only the middle man. You pretend to be talking on social media or chat, but you’re just a call center from the 70’s You don’t fix the problem, you don’t search for solutions, you only blame someone else and your customer gets nothing. Except cold overpriced late food he does not wants to eat because he’s too nervous after 2 hours with your customer services.

If you provide a service you’re responsible for the outcome, if you don’t take responsability I’m working with the guy who does do it for you and I’m not using your services.

You had one job …

What the actual case shows here is an example of launching a service where you’re supposed to be a facilitator and making the whole process more painful by not caring about your customers, pretending they are not your customers but those of the actual company delivering the real service.

But here is the catch: if you’re not happy with the middle man, if the facilitator is not doing his job you go directly with the real service provider and the facilitator looses business, because that’s his only job and if he’s not doing it why would we use him?

You had one job … one.