Hey, Marks & Spencer, what can you get me? Personal service would be nice.
The Basingstoke M&S no has self-service screens. My observation was that about 1 in 3 customers were having problems with it.
A lady asked me for help has no staff were immediately to hand. She wanted toast. The system has no search function and toast didn’t feature in the bakery screen. Where was it? On the ‘Breakfast on Toasts’ page but not visible unless you scrolled to the bottom. Madness.
When you do complete your order, you take a unit that lights up and vibrates when your order is ready to collect. The moment I sat down my unit lit up. I went to the counter and was told it has to continuously vibrate and in fact my order was not ready. Amazing, I don’t know why I hadn’t guessed that.
One of the odd things is that when you get pissed off by an aspect of the customer experience, you tend to notice everything and anything. And I was primed.
Why can’t we have normal plates large enough for the order? Spreading butter on the first half of my scone was impeded by the lack of space for the other half.
Ha ha, well, I wasn’t that upset. In fact the cheese scone was delicious (even if when ordering it the system asked me if I wanted cream and strawberry jam with it…with a cheese scone!).
The point of this post is simply about, a) my disappointment about social interaction being yet further eroded, and b) if the customer experience is bad it has a habit of staying that way.
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