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Tag Archives: costco.com

Are you easy to work with? – a lesson in client responsiveness

Frustrated business man waiting on the phone in a hotline queueBack in 2009, I blogged about how lack of client responsiveness led to a difficult experience trying to make an online purchase from the U.S. arm of the mega-company Costco.  Essentially, the company (at least back then, hopefully not now) was driven by its systems rather than the needs of its customers.  I was once again reminded of that situation with two recent experiences which gave rise to the topic of today’s blog … which is a question – Are you easy to work with?  And I don’t necessarily mean just as an individual, but also as a department, a division, or even a company?  As a leader, you have an area and scope of responsibility and my question relates to that as well – do your clients, customers, co-workers find you easy to work with?

Here are the two experiences that got me thinking about this question.  The first happened to a professional colleague who wanted to hire a service provider, but had to jump through hoops to even talk to this person.  Continue reading →

Who’s leading your organization? You or your “system”?

So a few weeks ago I tried to make a purchase at Costco.com; “tried” being the operative word.

I went online, selected a gift for a friend who lives in California, paid using a credit card, and received email notification that my order was in progress.  A couple of days later, I checked online to see the order status, and imagine my surprise when I discovered that the order had been cancelled!  What?!  No notification, just cancelled!  It was late at night, so I fired off a note to Costco.com’s customer service department asking “What gives?”   Got an email back the next day with a cryptic message that my order was cancelled because the billing information I entered did not match what my credit card issuer had on file for me.  Huh? Continue reading →