Foot Locker Responds to Report of Bad Customer Experience

Because customer management is about enacting rather than declaring, customer experience assessments need to evaluate practice rather than promise. Any brand can tout its commitment to the customer—it would have to be insane not to—but only those who live by that commitment are worthy of praise.

It is for that reason that Call Center IQ frequently discusses specific brand experiences. Though technically isolated and anecdotal, the explorations provide a level of illustration unrivaled by abstract discussions of best practices. They strive to identify brands by the value of their processes rather than the merit of their thought processes.

While such exploratory pieces have lauded brands like Zappos and The Trump Hotel for their devout commitments to customer centricity, they have also exposed businesses whose theoretical senses of customer centricity have not yet become actual ones. Based on the experiences they delivered, companies like Ally, Time Warner Cable and Best Buy proved themselves either incapable of or unwilling to attain a high standard of service.

A recent incident revealed Foot Locker to be one of those brands. By not only failing to successfully execute a transaction but also failing to identify why it failed and what could be done to rectify the situation, Foot Locker exposed a wide gap between the service it delivers and the service it should be delivering.

With a support system insufficient for the needs of its customers, Foot Locker demonstrated that while it might sell shoes, it had not actually walked a foot, let alone a mile, in those of its customers.

Far from the first brand skewered by a CCIQ anecdotal exploration, Foot Locker did do something unlike any other: it responded.

In a detailed e-mail response, a representative for Foot Locker acknowledged the issue, apologized and offered a forward-looking solution for the trouble.

Having shared what went wrong during the recent Foot Locker experience, it was only logical for Call Center IQ to share the company’s attempt to make it right.

Granted, whether this letter sufficiently makes the issue right is up for debate—one in which we hope you, the reader, participate—but it undoubtedly represents a more concerted effort than that put forth by the other aforementioned brands.

Good Afternoon Brian,

I have had the opportunity to look over your chat from a week ago, and I have also read your blog entry about your recent ordering/customer service experience with us here at Footlocker.com.

After reading through your chat in particular I can understand you walking away from this situation feeling frustrated. If I were in your shoes, and I asked what were by all counts reasonable questions, and received different versions of no information, and as you stated "no retroactive solution" , I would have reacted perhaps in a less civilized way than you did. With this I would like to apologize to you for the frustration we caused, but I would also like to applaud you for your patience

I offer no excuse for what happened, while I do understand the situation on our end and why Dan K. was confused it is not an excuse to have you leaving us with a bad customer experience. What happened with your order? When an order comes back with a G-number like yours did, this means internally to us it went into a contingency status. This could be due to a glitch, or many other factors. On a daily basis when we take in upwards of 10,000 - 45,000 orders a day at times, we normally would have less than 100 where this happens. Most of the time even with these we can manually enter them, or resubmit them electronically.

With your order this was not the case, the payment information was stripped and we did not have it. The problem then is, it is not until someone from our Prepaid and Claims Department receives this order physically in there hand do they realize "Hey Brian Cantor thinks he has an order coming, and he doesn't!". The system is not perfect when this happens, and I assure you we have improved the process over the last few years, but in rare cases like yours the ball was clearly dropped.

My agents like Dan can look up these failed orders, clearly work needs to be done on my end with my associates to make sure they can decipher what they are seeing, and to communicate with our customers like you so that you do feel confident what has happened, and our ability to fulfill your order in the future. We failed on both counts with you and for that I apologize.

Where do we go from here? We are in a unique situation where you have, despite this experience, ordered from us again. I thank you for this and while I can not promise that future orders will all be flawless, I do hope that our customer service is better in the future due to feedback like yours. What I would like to do is to send you a $25 email giftcard. This is not to make up for your inconvenience, but is more designed to hopefully have you try us again in the future. When and if that day comes please email me and let me know how it goes, and how the experience was for you. While I am hopeful it is positive, rest assured that if it is not, you now have a direct contact to fix any issues and to communicate with you what is going on more easily.

Jack (Rosenberg)