Talk to any retail analyst and you are likely to hear about the importance of becoming multichannel. Let customers dictate the conversation and communicate in their preferred ways. To this degree, many retailers have scrambled to promote the different mechanisms in which you can communicate with them – be it phone, the Web, text, chat, etc.

Don’t want to wait in line at Subway? Order online and skip the line! (Anyone tried it?)
Delivering channel options has a direct impact on the customer experience. Consumers, after all, are busy people. Anything that saves them time or effort boosts the customer experience – unless, (gulp) you fail to do it correctly.

I love the idea of being able to order food online. When my laptop is glued to my fingertips, it’s nice to Google search nearby restaurants, check out the menus online, and then if the capability is there, place my order via the restaurant Web site. I am an annoying orderer. I keep the order taker on the phone for way longer than necessary, asking questions and frequently changing my mind. Ever called to order Chinese and the person on the other end of the line says, “Ten minutes” then hangs up before you can ask for the total? Yeah, that gives me a lot of anxiety. What if they misunderstood my order? Did they really hear my address? I need a lot of confirmation and ordering online gives me that. I can deliberate my options without wasting anyone’s time (but my own) and I can be as picky and specific as I want. Plus, often the restaurant sends a follow-up email with your order confirmation and estimated delivery time. Fabulous.

Except, two out of the three times I have ordered food online, I have experienced massive fails. Instance Number One: I ordered a sandwich from Quiznos and specified the time I wanted it delivered. It was a field option in the ordering form, after all. (I placed it two hours ahead of time so I could get a workout in before the delivery). Uh oh… when I headed to the gym, the delivery person headed to my hotel room, completely ignoring the specified time. Quizno’s was really nice about the discrepancy. They remade my sandwich and redelivered it. The delivery person admitted to me that they almost didn’t see my order at all. They aren’t used to people ordering online.

Fail number two: I decided to order a pizza from Papa Johns the other night and being at my computer and looking at the menu from the Papa Johns’ site, I placed my order online. I got an email soon thereafter quoting my time as 30-40 minutes. Well, an hour passed. No pizza. So I called the local branch to ask about the delivery status. Yikes. The man who answered the phone shouted – and I mean really shouted — at me, “It takes an hour – it’s coming!!!” To which I replied, “Why are you being rude?” Click. (He hung up.) The employee’s manner led me to place a complaint — again, online. As I was submitting feedback about the rude service, my pizza arrived. “Um, why’d you order online?” the delivery woman asked me, looking at me as if I had three alien heads. I tried to sputter out something like, “If it’s there for customers to use, why are you surprised when they use it?” But, I realized it wasn’t worth my words. I took my pizza – which was delicious, by the way-and put my frustrations to rest for the night.

As much as I would like to think that these are two isolated situations, I don’t. The fact is, I don’t think a lot of retailers are ready to be multichannel. It’s not that they don’t have the technological capability in place – the technology is there. I think it requires a certain cultural change that employees are either ignoring or haven’t been trained to recognize. Maybe there are branches of Papa Johns and Quizno’s that are 100 percent right in embracing multi-channel. But for all the times they have done it right, doing it wrong -albeit only a few times – is what customers remember. If you can’t do it well, it might be best not to do it at all.