Erieversible

In the last 24 hours I’ve had some email and telephone 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 better news?

First of all a big thank you to David Sims for taking the time to get involved.  The overall situation I and many others find ourselves in is a mixture of technical issues with the rewards process, for which David is responsible, and some more general customer service issues.

On the technical issues, a key page on the Rewards R Us website has been taken down temporarily until that problem is fixed.  This is great, as it prevents more and more customers running into the same problems, and is a far better approach than simply leaving it online.  A much more customer focused approach.  I won’t bore you with the technical details of the problem, but I understand it has been properly identified, which is more than half the battle in sorting it out.

On the general customer service issues David has been provided with all the necessary details and will pass them on to the areas concerned.

So, I now fully understand why they’ve got the problems they’ve got and a key step (taking down the Retro-Credit page) has been taken towards reducing the pain for other customers.  I believe the technical problems with the scheme itself will be overcome quickly now, though suspect the more general customer service issues noted in the 11th November article will take a little longer.

Sometimes when a fundamental problem happens in a project it is all too easy to put all the effort into sorting out the root of the problem and not enough effort into recognizing and dealing with the effects.  Now there is evidence Toys R Us are indeed concerned about how this is affecting customers - I hope others see the evidence too.

I understand the response to the scheme has been quite astounding so let’s hope all problems are sorted soon and Toys R Us have a successful seasonal period.  The economy needs schemes like this to succeed in parting us from our money in these harsh times!

The Toys R Us rewards scheme remains broken.  Having been told it would be fixed for Tuesday, it remains a monument to poor quality project management on Thursday.

An email asking for clarification, sent via an online form (so one has to assume it got there) to the Toys R Us corporate HQ has disappeared into a black hole.  Not even an automated response.

As a Brit I had a notion that Toys R Us was good at Customer Service.  Not sure where that notion came from.  Right now I can’t think of any company worse at Customer Service than Toys R Us.  Sad.  Another myth is dashed.

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?