The Kiosk conundrum
Recently I placed an ‘Online’ order from one of the Kiosks inside a retail outlet. Used a couple of coupons to get $10 off while making the payment at the POS. The customer service was great and the order was delivered in time. As it happens sometimes with orders placed Online, the actual product was not exactly as I expected it to be, so I called up the call center to return it. To my surprise the service representative returned me $10 more than the actual amount I paid!!! So this is what happened: The order I placed at the Kiosk went through to the ‘Online’ system, but the coupon that I used while making the payment at the POS never did. The Customer Service Representative, who was looking at the order in the ‘Online’ system, never saw the coupon and simply returned me the amount that the Kiosk showed.
And guess what, this is not unique to the store I went to. There are many organizations that embraced the pre-paid Kiosk ordering (order Online at the Kiosk and pay at the POS) model so that they do not lose a sale; but they did not do a very good job integrating the ‘Online’ and Retail channels.
And coupons are not the only adjustments that can be done on an order. There are a lot more including Price Match, Price Guarantee and Cancels among others. Add to that the complexity that can be induced by just varying the timing the adjustment is made. The retail payment systems and ‘Online’ systems need to be joined at the hip to work through these scenarios.
Here is what needs to be done:
- Supply Chain leadership needs to give more attention to these Store-Online channel integrations. This being a problem that overlaps two channels, sometimes it becomes no one’s problem.
- Have a comprehensive list of valid business rules and scenarios for cross channel ordering to work on. This will need to be a joint effort involving business and IT teams and tradeoffs will need to be made between the desired level of customer service and the investments required to achieve it.
- Integrate the Retail channel information with the ‘Online’ IT systems. There is no one-size-fits-all IT solution that can be used. The complexity and cost will depend on how convoluted the individual processes for the two channels are, and how silo’ed the IT systems are.
There can be some manual ways to avoid the “overpayment” kind of scenarios that I started this blog with. Like the Customer Service Representative (CSR) looking through multiple systems and manually calculating the refund amounts. But these processes can be really painful for the CSR group.
