Not my multi-channel darling anymore.

Is omnichannel just a dream?

So, if you live in the UK, and work in any way in retail — in a retail business, commentating on it, analysing it, etc — John Lewis Partnership is frequently held out as the amazing heights to which retailers all should strive to achieve in multi-channel excellence. In fact, they are like the weather in retail news. Reported on every week? Nah. Every day now. And to give them credit, their week-on-week, and YoY numbers rise (which has caused me to ask why this is news, yet we print their rise every week, as if we are following a manned mission to Mars…I reckon a decline is news, but no, anything they do is news) and we all look, and many go, ah, yes, good old Johnny Lewis.

But, the thing is, their ‘multi-channel’ offer hasn't moved on loads from what it was when it was first launched a few years ago. At least from the customer facing side. You can order online and pick up in store. Click and collect. Whoo-hoo. And if you are in store, and they don’t have the item you want, they will check online, and order it and you can have it delivered to you, or come back and pick it up the next day. Fabulous? Not any more. Just necessary. Keeping up with the Joneses, as it were.

In the past 24 hours, in one single hour, John Lewis let me down 3 times. And I wasn’t asking for the moon, or a manned mission to Mars. Just the following.

Incident One

1. 20.18pm Sunday night. I decided I was done with one corner of my kitchen looking like a recycling tip, and I had read my multiple back issues of Home & Gardens and Country Homes & Interiors and I was now fully aware that my solution was a £199 JosephJoseph Intelligent Waste unit. How had I survived this long without it, I wondered. It is currently only available via John Lewis or JosephJoseph, so off I went to log onto John Lewis.
2. 20.21 Sunday night. I put the Intelligent Waste unit in my bin. I scroll down the page prepared to buy the 12 different types of bags I imagine I will need to make this ‘unit’ function, to find no cross/up sell available. Of bin liners. I wonder if merchandising just took a nap, or what is happening….

Up and cross sell unit, nary a bin liner to be shown

3. 20.23 Sunday night. I use the on site search for JosephJoseph bin liners and find out that, ahhh, they are out of stock. And no option to be notified when they are in stock. Grrr.

Bins to be had, but not a liner to be found.

So I figure I will have to get the liners somewhere, else, and proceed to checkout. Which is where I slam into Incident Two, about 20.25.

Just before Christmas I had to reset my password for John Lewis online. I tried logging in three times, and when I had no luck, I hit the ‘forgot password’ link, figuring John Lewis would zip me an email and I’d be off. About 10 minutes later, I gave up waiting as no email had yet arrived. I remembered my password in the meantime, and got into the checkout.

Which was exciting, as it gave me opportunity for Incident Three to raise its head. My other half works for a large bank, and their employees have the ability to buy a John Lewis / Waitrose gift card that they can keep topping up, which saves them 7% on regular prices. So we realised a bit before I went online to start my search for recycling nirvana that we'd need to top up the card to have enough on it to buy the Intelligent Waste unit I had now determined I had. to. have.

Himself had topped up the card about an hour ago as I was powering to checkout, and he now calmly recited the number and pin for me to enter into checkout. Except. John Lewis claimed there was much less on the card than he had topped it up to. I looked at him and started speaking in tech (he loves that) and guessed that until John Lewis did some of their overnight BI work, that card was not going to recognise that he had added that money, so it was a futile exercise. Real time was not happening in John Lewis world. Nor was one hour lag time. So I resorted to charging it to my John Lewis Partnership card, knowing this would earn me about £0.03 in vouchers.

Cycling back to what should have happened with the bin liners, John Lewis should been keenly studying how Nordstrom has gone omnichannel. It should have done what my brain did last night, which was figure when I went to my chosen store to pick up my click & collect, before I did that, I would go into the store, and buy the liners from the store. Which I reckoned they would have in stock. I was right. If John Lewis was more multichannel, or omnichannel (or just concerned about the best customer experience) it would have had the computer note my chosen store, note I had no bin liners in my cart online, note I had done a search and the online store was sold out, and check the physical store inventory, and ask me if I wished to add some to my order. Not that hard. Nor that irrational. Kind of common sense. Good retailing, one might say.

We keep saying a click & collect customer buys more in store — which is true — but how much of that is because they are making up for poor technology processes? Plugging gaps, as I did above, in store, and not *really* buying stuff they didn’t intend to (like my new Reebok jump rope. That is is true add on, had no intention of buying, but did because I went in the store while picking up a click & collect order.)

So we have a system that still has stock in silos, and doesn’t update gift cards in anything close to real time (the update on the credit for the gift card still had not hit this morning), but the real kicker in all of the above is the following:

That ‘forgot password’ link I hit last night? The one you usually get an email from anywhere in the next 2–3 minutes MAX advising how to retrieve or reset a password? The one I sent at about 20.25 last night?

It arrived at 11:11 this morning. Yep. More than fourteen hours later.

Here is a photo of it, in case you want to stare in wonderment. I know I did.

Here it is. Is 14 hours better late than never??

So. In America, a country I used to live in, they say three strikes and you are out. I am not daft enough to think I can live without John Lewis. But I do think they have gotten a bit comfortable.

Nordstrom…if you ever want to open a UK branch, let me know. I will be yours forever!

Kristine is an Anglo-American, Brooklynite by birth, British citizen by choice. She is really quite simple. Wants: wine, whisky, 30 hour day, lots of sleep. Ecomm geek. Sports mad. Wants to be in Cornwall, and in her next career, an F1 driver.