Imagine you’ve had a lovely hot bath and your aching back and knees are feeling far better now than they did prior to getting into the tub and relaxing to the point of…ooops, what time is it?!?
Oh, 0100.
As I’m drying off, it suddenly occurs to me that I was supposed to have a delivery from Amazon for a six-pack of Cavender’s Greek Seasoning (the big 8 oz canisters) but curiously I’ve not seen any notifications or anything about it.
That’s rather unusual as I’m usually bombarded with all sorts of notifications…order placed, order shipped, sometimes you get the “your order is X stops away and are you paranoid enough to want to see it on a real-time map?”, and the text messages along the way up to the point of delivery.
Seeing as I’d gotten in a hour long nap, I figured I’d see what was going on with the order.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this…
Being somewhat curious, I click the “Track Package” button and get this amazingly clear and coherent status:
Ah…the hits just keep on coming.
Normally, I have no problems with Amazon. I order stuff and the stuff I ordered generally shows up on my doorstep without too much fuss or hassle and certainly a lot less petrol and time expended by me to get those items.
I rather like that feature because I generally dislike going to the shoppes.
I’ve never been fond of crowds, I truly despise pushy and nosy sales-people, and very rarely will you ever find me wandering aimlessly round the shoppes doing this thing called “shopping”.
That’s not to say it doesn’t happen from time to time but you’ll find that my patience for the shoppes (and to be honest the people that I find there!) is inversely proportional to the nerd content of the proprietor’s premises. 😉
Anywho, generally Amazon has worked well for me other than the occasional kamikaze Amazon lorry driver (which I was promised a written follow up but then the case was unceremoniously and unilaterally closed without so much as a by your leave which isn’t exactly the smartest strategy when the Prime membership renewal is coming due soon).
But one really weak spot in the experience is if you find yourself contending with a situation that the chat-bot can’t handle.
It’s not like you can just ring them up when you know you’ve got a problem on your hands that there’s no way the rules-based AI chat agent will be able to cope with which is generally anything that requires more than the minimal amount of common sense and intelligent thinking.
To be fair, the chat bot does usually handle very basic tasks without the humans getting involved. Returns are generally a doddle…ask for the return, get and print the slip, and then drop it off at Kohl’s or UPS and they handle the shipping back to Amazon. Lovely!
But in this case, I was genuinely curious as to what happened to this particular package and why is it that I’m only finding out by accident some 18 hours after the fact having had *ZERO* notification from Amazon through any of the communications channels!
So seeing as I’ve got a few minutes before I’ll have a chance at falling asleep again (this time in my actual bed!) before having to get up at 0600 to go collect some kids for school, I figured I’d see if the chat would answer those basic questions.
Sadly, their chat function doesn’t allow capturing the actual conversation (or at least doing so easily) because the next half hour was spent asking those questions six different ways with someone who seemed completely oblivious to comprehending fairly basic English.
Perhaps the agent should have stood for election to the House of Commons in Parliament because normally evasions of the quality I was getting are the hallmark of modern day Prime Ministers at the despatch box during PMQs (Prime Minister’s Questions).
About the only information the agent could impart was that the package was somehow damaged during transit and it’s remains was being returned to the shipper.
I may not be the brightest bulb in the box but I’m pretty sure I’d already worked that out for myself and didn’t need a frustrating chat agent to confirm.
I’d like to think I’m not terribly unreasonable…some times things happen in transit and the package gets damaged. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often given the reportedly abusive operational tempos in their warehouses where speed of packaging things is the primary rating criterion if you discount being against unionising the workforce and/or using the lavatory whilst on duty.
All joking aside, I’m actually OK with them choosing to not dump something on my doorstep they could see clearly was damaged goods before it left the shipping depot.
That’s not the problem I was trying to address with the agent.
The problem was that I was never notified of the problem at all through any of the communications channels they have to my phone (EMAIL, text, alerts) and only discovered it by accident.
Was it too much to ask that they cop to someone in the supply chain drop-kicking the package for distance and ask me if I’d like them to try again or just process a refund?
Apparently it was a step too far to treat me as an adult worthy of respect and give me the facts to make an informed decision.
Supposedly the agent is escalating this to “Leadership” but given the far more serious matter of their lorry driver’s situational awareness being so compromised that he couldn’t hear a horn blaring at him for at least three seconds to try to get him to avoid a collision was also escalated to the same “Leadership” who did nothing and communicated even less, I’m not exactly holding my breath that I’ll get any sort of reasonable redress of my grievances with that lot.
Again…not exactly a great strategy when I just received the EMAIL with Prime’s looming renewal in it.
Don’t get me wrong…I generally like Amazon Prime, especially when I can get my fix with the Top Gear guys on “The Grand Tour” and enjoy watching Jezza Clarkson arsing about “Diddly Squat Farm” and showing conclusively he needs to stick to motoring programmes and using a bit of common sense when it comes to dashing off a blistering and ill-advised hate-filled rant against the Duchess of Sussex.
I do love the timely shipping of goods that most of the time arrive in good condition and on-time.
But if push comes to shove, it’s something I can live without now that Amazon’s competitors have stepped up their online game thanks to the pandemic shutting their normal distribution channels in the shoppes.
They might want to consider their position very carefully.