The weakest link

Breaking the e-business chain

8* %$)x”! Haulage, you are the weakest link. Goodbye.

The adage that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link was thrown into sharp relief this week for the author.

For, if ever there was a more apt application of the adage, it is in the fulfilment chain of online traders.

No matter how slick the ordering processing is on a web site, customers ultimately gauge the success of their transaction by the speed and efficiency with which their goods arrive on the doorstep. And the more links in that fulfilment chain, the greater the likelihood the customer is going to be disappointed.

That certainly proved to be the case for yours truly after ordering a cowboy hat from a company in Wichita, Kansas. As you do.

[At this point, an explanation might be in order. The hat wasn’t for me. Really. It was for the significant other’s Christmas because she thought she’d look cool in it driving her Land Rover!]

But back to the plot. The said hat was dispatched from Kansas on August 25 and arrived in Heathrow on Novemeber 26. The following day the cowgirl hat cleared Customs. On November 28 Glasgow was reached and the hat subsequently signed for and handed over to the sub contractor on November 29 to complete the last leg(?) of the journey to the wild North West.

So far so good, he writes with a wry smile.

Problem was the last link in this chain contrived to mislay/ignore the parcel in its depot. The result being that it took the hat a fortnight to travel the last six miles of its transatlantic odyssey.

Living on an island you automatically add on a few more days to any delivery date. So when the Kansas company emailed on November 28 and quoted ten business days for delivery, there was no concern expressed about the non-arrival of the hat until the end of last week.

Several phone calls and the hat finally found its destination at 5.20 pm on Monday (December 22) of this week.

Being the good e-citizen that I am, I dutifully had a good old moan when I called the main haulage contractor to pay the import duty. I trust that like the dog which has been kicked, will now chase the cat.

The point here is that with a long distribution chain, it only takes one link to sully the customer’s purchasing experience. What we can’t know unless we take steps to monitor it, is whether the goods have arrived timeously. Without the customer complaining directly to us, rather than the haulier or the haulier’s sub contractor, it’s difficult to make amends.

The worst case scenario is the dissatisfied customer mumfing not to you, but to their friends about the poor service.

While in many cases it is impractical for high volume companies to follow up each and every order, a spot of random after sales TLC will help fathom what happens to your goods after they ship. Not only will you get a snapshot of your distribution chain’s reliability, you may also win some repeat business into the bargain.

This story does have a happy ending. The good news is that the cowboy hat fits…Yeeha!