Click and Collect Email Message Wording - Please help!
under review
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Will (MR)
Following discussions and a previous canny post: We would like to propose a change to the email message that is sent immediately to customers.
Currently it says: “All of your items are available for immediate collection from your chosen collection location.”
We believe a better phrase could be used as we let customers know when their order is ready, preventing wasted journeys, and allowing staff to resolve any stock issues quickly and efficiently.
Some suggestions:
"All of your items will shortly be available for collection from your chosen collection location.”
"Please wait for the store to confirm the stock is ready before travelling, and remember to bring ID and your payment card with you."
"We will contact you as soon as the order is ready to collect, remember to bring ID and your payment card with you"
"Please wait for the store to confirm the order is ready before travelling"
"This order will be available to collect soon, please wait for the store to contact you before travelling"
K
Kirstie
Click and Collect is a great feature but the text customers are receiving is very misleading. The customer believes that their order is ready for collection upon receipt of an email that says the items are in stock and ready for collection at your chosen location's opening hours. If I received an email stating this, I would think at 0900 I can go and collect my items. This is not the case. The Click and Collect customers should receive an automated email once their item has been 'dispatched' to say that their order is now ready for collection. The current email is leading the customer down the garden path and in turn upsetting them. Not ideal!
Is there an update for this??
A
Adam Kappa
We really like the idea of Click & Collect so we direct as many people to it as we can, but our shop staff are running into issues with the website messaging for multiple reasons;
- The website says immediate collection - which puts our shop staff in an awkward position where they have to explain to an angry customer that the website is incorrect. They can't have the item for their holiday tomorrow right now.
- The customer gets an email saying that the order is available to pick up - there's an option to add extra messaging to the email, but the customer has to scroll past the email header, informing them that the item is available for pick-up. (Which one is it?)
It results in a poor customer experience if they've made a trip before we've had up chance to pick it up from one of the warehouses. The website takes people's money by making a promise, then the reality is we have to let customers down.
Changing how the offer is presented would fix these issues.
Our ideal situation - It would be great if it was similar to Screwfix - after adding the item to your cart a pop-up comes up with more information.
It displays all relevant information setting the expectations. E.g. “Item has been reserved” “You’ll be informed when the item is ready to pick up”
.
Or a workaround - An option to hide the "data-leadtime" and control over the email wording. It's then our responsibility to contact each customer when it's ready.
Neil McQuillan
under review
Neil McQuillan
I've reread all the comments and understand the frustrations we are unintentionally causing. I'm going to see if I can find another route forwards.
Question
This block shows when items have a delay our customer has set (warehouse delay or item preparation e.g. PDI delay). This is actually useful is it not? It also shows for mail order ( e.g. This item is despatched in 2 days).
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Will (MR)
Neil McQuillan: i don't believe you can put item delays on globally, and it then tells customer "we DON'T have this for you to collect today, thus putting them off ordering". Maybe just comment out the block.
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Ben
Neil McQuillan: I think the delay message works ok. I think the main frustration is just with the wording when items are in stock as retailers need time to prepare the order and would like to manage customer expectations.
"All of your items are available for immediate collection from your chosen Collection Location."
As we have an editable message we can use for collection instructions I think simply removing this message and only displaying a default message when there is a delay would be the most effective solution.
Neil McQuillan
Ben: Not all our customers contact consumers for each order directly (when the order is ready) so I cannot make that change, we need to continue to set some kind of expectation of when items are free to stop lots of Customer Service calls asking when items are ready.
What about:
"All of your items are in stock for collection from your chosen Collection Location. <Only shown if blue message is populated> See the message in blue below for more information <End only show> "
I wonder if we can show the store opening times here as well... That might be one for the future.
Something like a wording change which softens the message without removing the intent completely might allow me to please all parties.
This will still need to go to the translators but this seems like something I might be able to rush into the release in January.
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Ben
Neil McQuillan: Yes, what you have suggested would work for us. My suggestion on the other thread on this page of adding separate editable blue messages depending on whether an order is fully in stock locally or not would enhance this solution even further.
Neil McQuillan
Ben: Brilliant, that means we can communicate to the consumer where the stock and not create problems for our customers. Does this work for the majority interested here?
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Norvite Farm & Country
Neil McQuillan: Sorry, Neil, this really doesn't work as it still looks clunky and unprofessional and does not seem to be even remotely in line with the industry standard, where professional retailers advise that the order is being prepared and then provide notification when the order is ready for collection. I would be very interested to know which of your retailers this wouldn't work for as all orders require to be picked and processed in all stores so I cannot understand why this is being suggested to be an issue. Receive/print order, pick order, process order, notify order (or dispatch order if not C&C). If some of your clients are not following this process, do they have a different system in place? If not, then can you clarify why the text line cannot simply be deleted?
Neil McQuillan
complete
I have updated this as complete as the associated task in our internal system is closed. I'm not sure why it did not auto update.
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Norvite Farm & Country
Neil McQuillan: Evening Neil - can you advise why would you mark it as complete when it has not been resolved? Still having customer issues with this wording, though thankfully with less pressure and intensity than last week.
Neil McQuillan
All,
The editable section is our best solution to this problem. The message which is generated is based on the lead time of the stock in the system as such it cannot be edited as it's what you've set on the stock lead time :-(
e.g. It's programatically generated across a stack of different languages.
If you introduce a genuine delay via a despatch / collection delay or the item is in another store the message alters correctly.
I'm loath to simply remove things as other customers likely find this useful. Whenever we do that we usually end up having to put it back again when we get complaints from customers. I'm sorry we cannot do this.
We are having a fundamental rethink of emails next year and we'll look at this again then and produce a better solution.
Currently the templates are the same across all customers so we can update then and manage them in different languages. This has clearly reached its sell by date, but altering this is not a quick fix.
Neil
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Will (MR)
Neil McQuillan: Neil it was added, without any notice, removing it without notice will ONLY generate an occasional query from a customer who may have used the service before. - contacting the store to say 'when will my order be ready?' something I boldly believe we as retailers actually welcome! - and even if not, we can blame the holiday period from not putting an accurate timescale on this.
From my very basic approximation of the issue, just comment out the line on the emails for a few weeks starting tonight!
Ask helpdesk to log the complaints from retailers who are receiving them from their customers about the lack of information about when a collection can be made. if there are more than 56 different retailers complaining, then let us know.
We'd prefer to use your fancy sms messaging system to tell customers when it's ready!
I for one do NOT want to be the employee on 24th December, at 3 minutes to closing where a desperate customer has just placed an order that needs picking/assembling for a Christmas Present and then walks in a minute later expecting it to be ready to go!
Also will seasonal closing times be reflected in the immediate message timescales? if so do i speak to support to arrange? - we want to close early as usual on the 'eves'..
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Pasq
Neil McQuillan: "I'm loath to simply remove things as other customers likely find this useful" Question, is it many more customers than the ones who don't find it useful at all?.
And your wording of "likely" sort of implies that this was added not through complaints of CL customers wanting you to force us on "ready for immediate collection" added to click and collect
Neil McQuillan
Pasq: It's
my personal view
that C&C services will ultimately settle on 'if it's in stock at a store, it's available for collection now'. It's retail stores biggest advantage over Amazon.
That said it was added at the request of retailers on Canny and some face to face discussions.
I'm not intentionally trying to place myself in opposition to the people posting here, this is something I care about getting right which is why we added the option for the message below, whilst trying to constrain the workload of making a programmatically generate message with lots of different display options work differently. I've clearly failed.
Ultimately if I'm honest there are a million and one things going on at any one point in time in the development space and we've just not given this enough thought when we've added the editable text for you!
How about adding an option to MT to hide the message entirely if 1. The order is C&C;
- The order is in free local stock.
This means we don't set a consumer expectation so you'd need to do it in the blue text which you can edit, or contact each customer individually.
Will (HA) I note your comments on SMS we have a prototype of two way SMS built this will come to Cloud POS next year - but could you could setup a 'C&C order ready' template using the existing customer comms functionality?
B
Ben
Neil McQuillan: I commented above exactly this before reading this response. I think the simplest resolution to everyones frustrations would be the ability to hide the message when items are in local stock. We can then just use the editable blue message for instructions.
Ideally in Cloud MT there would be separate editable blue instructions that display depending on whether the order is in local stock or SIM/delay stock. At the moment we have to keep it vague and give instructions for both scenarios.
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Will (MR)
Neil McQuillan: This will be my final input into this debate, as the threads are too confusing now.
50+ retailers hate it, I have 20+ customer facing staff who hate it!
---------------------------------------------------------
Please!!! comment it out/ turn it off immediately.
If you value the input users of Canny, turn it off.
If you value your retailers and their staff, turn it off.
If you value the ongoing benefit of click and collect, turn it off.
I'll speak to your support team and ask them to turn off click and collect for us entirely tomorrow and how to recored what was already 'not available to click and collect'
It's not worth the aggro.
Don't bodge it, without plenty of thought, accept it was a decision that was added too quickly, which should have been remedied quicker, you are forcing an impossible on the retailers which we don't need at this time of year.
I cannot believe it's taken so many posts to get you to remove something that was never needed!
Thank you
PLEASE SANTA ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS NO IMMEDIATE MESSAGE ON CLICK AND COLLECT!
Merry Christmas to all fellow retailers and CL Staff!
J
Joanne Ligthelm
hi you have added to customizable block and suggests in the update notes we can use to add things like please wait for confirmation of stock but it still says at the top ready for immediate collection which is contradictory and makes it look unprofessional can we not do away with it and just have the customizable text ?
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Norvite Farm & Country
Joanne Ligthelm: Neil McQuillan Hoping there might be an update on this that I have missed? We are really keen to have these misleading and unprofessional "available for immediate collection" messages removed ASAP. Better to say nothing than to give the customer poor information, surely? The interaction with this feed for 18 months + makes it very clear that a LOT of CL customers feel that this one sentence is making OUR customers unhappy. Whilst I understand that fully editable text may be complicated to engineer, it seems that this has happened in part, but I don't understand why this offending line cannot be deleted or replaced with simple text such as that suggested months ago by Will (MR).
A great experience of click & collect with Currys this week - placed C&C order; received an order confirmation stating "We've got your order, and it's being processed. Please sit tight for now, and don’t head to the store just yet. We'll send you another email to let you know when your tech's ready to collect. Won't be long!". Instantly impressive, clear and accurate communication, followed a while later by a "your tech order is ready" email. No brainer, surely CL???
W
Will (MR)
Norvite Farm & Country: We gave up, adding the message as above looks kludgy, customer communication is supposed to be clear, adding in sections that contradict are just adding to customer confusion. JUST CHANGE THE WORDING OR LET US.. PLEASE!
N
Nick Johnston
Norvite Farm & Country: What is the reason we cant edit the text? I cant see the impact or changing basic text with in a text box.
N
Norvite Farm & Country
Nick Johnston: I don't know but, unless I am completely missing something, we cannot do this simple edit even though it is going out to our customers in our name...
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Will (MR)
Nick Johnston: I believe the same fact that this message was changed without any retailer notification or update, on a whim and on I believe a Friday afternoon... - not impressed!!
N
Nick Johnston
Norvite Farm & Country: I fully agree with the point, outbound communication to our customers which is not shaped by us. We having a similar issue with Mail Chimp currently. Its been a challenge for us as a business to understand this way of working.
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Pasq
Norvite Farm & Country: This has been one monster of an embarrassing nightmare and headache for us and our customers the past few weeks.(and in the 10 years with CL) The worst time ever to have this "stupid misleading text of immediate collection, when Royal Mail are on strike and DPD etc are overwhelmed, customers are deciding to click and collect and come to the shop. Orders placed on evening or the school run, they rock up at the shop door at 9am wondering where the hell their order is and they have to wait while we pick it. Due to their annoyance they did not hang around buying more stuff as many would of if it had been more or a pleasurable shopping experience! Had so many complaints and frustrated customers who are not impressed that we are advertising immediate collection, when its a total farse and a lie.
We all in this thread feel this frustration, and it us the hardworking retailers who suffer, whom quite frankly keep Citruslime going and in business, and this wording should be change IMMEDIATELY. 56 votes and frustrated retailers does not look and feel good at all. Been with Citrulime 10 years and this is the worst thing ever!!
N
Norvite Farm & Country
Pasq: I share your frustration and simply can't understand why this is being ignored - 18 months since the thread was started by Will (MR), nearly 3 months since it was marked as being in progress, and with so many of us experiencing the same, customer-relationship-damaging issues.
Neil McQuillan Ben Kippax PLEASE can you at least explain to us why you are putting our hard-working customer-facing staff in this invidious position? If it helped drive sales, that might be one thing but this information is received AFTER the customer has made their purchase and is horribly misleading. We are LOSING customers as a result NOT creating trust or a positive experience - you only need to browse this thread to see the same issues being repeated again and again.
Better still, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE just delete the text from the order confirmation and leave it to all of us to decide how we communicate with our customers. I find a worrying arrogance in the continued ignoring of this issue, as though you know better than us what experience we want our customers to have when they shop with us. Everyone in this thread is experienced in retail, looking at your customer list, and with many decades of customer service between us. We are not telling you how to run your business yet in your insistence on keeping this detrimental line of text on all Click & Collect order confirmations, you are taking control of how we all want to run our businesses, which feels very wrong to me as well as to others in this thread (see Nick Johnston's comments above).
Neil McQuillan
Norvite Farm & Country: We definitely don't think you are wrong. It's worth reading my comments to Pasq above for a possible option.
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Norvite Farm & Country
Neil McQuillan: Just picked this up, Neil McQuillan and I am sorry to repeat my comments above that I simply do not think that you are offering a retailer-friendly solution. Nor even one that makes a great deal of sense to those at the customer-facing end.
Please just remove the text!
It doesn't encourage sales, as it is post-sale.
It doesn't build customer relationships as it is misleading.
You are trying to tell us how you think we should operate our retail businesses but that should be OUR choice - feel free to make suggestions that you think we may find beneficial but please STOP enforcing them as that is really inappropriate, especially when your "solutions" are causing such huge customer service problems for so many of your retailers....
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Nick Johnston
Norvite Farm & Country: Did this get any further ? more trivial but also supporting the main point. with our invoice template, we dont have "Company Number" next to the company number. I am told we cant edit this. Below it the word Vat number nice and clear. I am told it would have to be raised by Canny to get it changed and i cant just delete it and add it as a footer. To me thats a little daft.
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Norvite Farm & Country
Nick Johnston: Sadly not. Neil McQuillan seems determined that CL knows better than us how we want to serve our customers. If they won't remove it, I don't see why it can't be optional text - opt in or out if you do or do not want it to be used. It would thus please all CL customers and might be rather interesting and informative for them to see how many of us opted out! Blue boxes suggested just seem like yet more clunky nonsense rather than the clean, elegant, and most importantly ACCURATE communication we all want. We don't seem to be able to edit any of the key elements of the invoice templates which is a real pity as it is not the most contemporary format.
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