Update: After seeing this post Sunday morning, 1–800 Flowers visited my LinkedIn page (!), left me a voicemail, and delivered my mom her roses. So thank you 1–800 Flowers for going the distance for a customer. I really appreciate it.
I’m calling from 1–800 Flowers in the public relations department… in reference to your recent customer experience with us, I do have good news on my end. I also wanted to thank you for your article, because it definitely gave us feedback that we would like to provide to our IT department… Know that we worked really hard today to make sure that we are delivering those flowers and delivering on that sentiment… Thank you so much.
And my mom is so happy! She wrote me two 500-word emails. And she matched another cardigan to the roses.
And she made my dad sit in the photo.
Prior post: This is my mom and I. She’s 68 and retired. I build bots for a living. More on that later.
Mom is the hardest worker I know. She came to the US with nothing as a refugee and somehow managed scrimp and save and hustled so that her two boys grew up without a lot of wants. She’s super practical about money, as most immigrants are. She hates it when I spend money on gifts. Perfume for birthdays? Nope. Clothing for Christmases. Ha! Jewelry for New Years? Are you kidding me? She returns every single gift so that I can “learn to save money”.
Except for flowers.
She loves flowers. Roses especially. Perhaps she remembers herself as a young girl in Vietnam, before the Communists came and ripped her world apart.
Here she is with my dad in 1971. Look at those flowers! Did I mentioned that she loves flowers?
When she visits me in San Francisco, we always go to the rose garden. Roses are her favorite.
I now send her a dozen or two dozen roses when it’s Mother’s Day or her birthday. It’s the one gift of mine she keeps. She’ll take photos and sends them to me. And she’s so happy when she calls me! I like seeing this side of my mom.
Here she is posing with the latest bouquet. She even matched her cardigan and the candles to the roses. I don’t get to talk to her much, but she gets that flowers are my way of saying I need to call more.
Recently, I’ve been using the 1–800 Flowers Messenger bot to send flowers. It’s convenient, and I feel like chatting is a much more personal way to shop than tapping buttons on a website.
I’m also a big believer in bots. My day job is to build out good experiences on bots. And 1–800 Flowers has one of the more compelling bot products in the market right now. A week ago, I used the bot again to buy my mom flowers for Mother’s Day. My mom was going to get two dozen of her favorite flowers just in time. Technology works!
But nope. I checked my email and somehow 1–800 Flowers had replaced my mom as the recipient with another person. Confused, I checked the order number on their website to see what was going on. No dice. The tracking system only worked with web orders — bot orders weren’t supported. I tried 3 times on their mobile web site without success. Frustrating.
So I called 1–800 Flowers. After a few minutes, they told me someone would call me back. After 30 minutes of waiting, I got annoyed and tried messaging — and got an agent on chat. He ghosted me as well.
After another try, I got a human agent who was responsive.
It turned out that their system ‘overwrote’ my order. Mom won’t be getting her flowers. But of course, I can place another order — no delivery fee! Sounds pretty good, right?
Except, not really. Instead of correcting their error, 1–800 Flowers suggested that I put in another order for the same roses, except this time, I would have to pay $50 more (100%!!) to get the flowers delivered to Mom. The delivery fee would be waived, of course. :/
The product failed. I did everything right. In return, I needed to pay more to fix a mistake that 1–800 Flowers made. And on top of that, I wasted a good Saturday afternoon troubleshooting with them.
All in all, I’m pretty pissed. (Sorry mom!)
Reflecting further, a couple of immediate thoughts about bots as an e-commerce channel came to mind:
- A bot is just a channel. It’s not the product. Your bot is worth shit if you don’t deliver on customer satisfaction and your customer policy is broken.
- Bots are really useful for simple tasks, but they need to hook up to the rest of the company’s services, like error handling, tracking and support.
- Handing off to a human agent is great, especially when there are edge cases. Lots of bots probably should do this. I’m pretty sure the bot — being a new unit within 1–800 flowers — just messed up an easy case of repeat customers with the same recipient. In this case, delegating a human to resolve an issue quickly was in principle the right thing to do.
- Human agents who are used to email need training on the immediacy of chat. Email you can get by without responding to someone for days. On chat, you have to respond in seconds.
- Agents need the flexibility to solve problems in a way that makes sense. A customer never should pay more to get service that was already promised by a company. I am reminded of how employees at the Ritz Carlton get $2000 per day per guest to delight their customers without asking for supervision.
- Chat — while great when things work — require even more personalization. Customers expect responses right away, and they expect the person on the other end to empathize and work with them. User expectations are a lot higher in chats than email.
The bot was only a small part of the problem here — it was the poor showing from 1–800 Flowers in what could’ve been a great opportunity to retain a loyal customer.
I’m not giving up on bots, of course. I am, however, going to use another service to send my mom her roses.