Failures R Us
Yes, the world’s biggest toy store, or however they like to describe themselves, have launched a rewards scheme. Unfortunately, in the rush to launch it in time for Christmas, they have provided a classic example of poor quality management. 
Here am I, looking for a Project Manager role, and Toys R Us demonstrate that time to market is more important than quality. What chance do I have?
- Their RewardsRUs website is not recording purchases. They admit this is a major problem and teams are working 24/7 on it. Fairly fundamental issue I would have thought - customers are not getting credit for purchases.
- Emails sent to them through their online form result in a non-delivery message from the Toys R Us servers saying they can’t get the email mailbox to respond.
- The “Welcome to Rewards R Us” email sent out to everyone who signed up has an incorrect telephone number for assistance stated. Calling that number simply gets an unobtainable tone.
- When you manage to get an email to Customer Services you get an auto reply which essentially says “We got your email but you didn’t send it via the online form so we are not going to read it”. Customer Service? Not where I come from it isn’t!
- The customer service telephone line which, and I quote, “available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!” (their exclamation point, not mine) is actually open from 11am to 10pm. I have not yet managed to work out how that equates to 24/7.
They tell me that all their problems will be sorted out by Tuesday (tomorrow). We will see. Meanwhile there is no message on their website that acknowledges the problems they are having. No helpful customer information at all. Presumably they are just hoping things will go away…
See what happens when you have rubbish Project Management?
Tags: customer service, failure, project management, rewards scheme, toys r us
November 11th, 2008 at 9:17
i found your blog through my friend’s. my dad is from liverpool and married my mum - from erie! they lived in stockport for a few years, then we moved back to erie about 22 years ago. what part of england are you from?
oh, and about the post - what is wrong with these people? i used to love toys r us. now it seems they are just dumb.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:44
I think that Toys R Us, like many companies, has been really caught out by the consumer spending effects of the ‘credit crunch’ or whatever you like to call it. This rewards scheme is temporary, presumably a trial, and looks like it has been rushed out in a hurry to cover the Christmas spending period. All far too reactive rather than proactive, and I remain stunned by the lack of testing that seems to have gone into it. Will be interesting to see how they recover the situation. If they do!
November 14th, 2008 at 19:07
[...] contact with the Director of Loyalty at Toys R Us, who picked up on the recent blog entries (Failures R Us 11th November and Update 13th November) regarding problems with their new rewards scheme. So, what’s the [...]