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?
