A Slice of Delay...

It was my first experience of ordering from Slice of Itlay. And possibly it will rarely happen again. There was an important lesson which we learnt during MBA and yesterday's experience was a good example of it - Product is not everything. The accompanying services are much more important.

The trigger for ordering from Slice of Itlay(SoI) was their beautiful pamphlet which came along the newspaper with a wide variety of delicacies and "Express Delivery" prominently displayed on it. SoI had made an impact on this first moment of truth. But sadly, it went downhill thereafter.

In the evening, a phone call was made. When I told them that I wanted to order for a home delivery, the response was "1 second". There was fumbling noise and this guy asked another person to take the order. The second guy came along and asked me my contact number and name. On being told, there was no response for a long time apart from "Sir, 1 Second" - marring the very definition of a Second! Then he let me know that there was some problem with the computer.

May be the SoI people can henceforth update their training program with  the suggestion that the customer is not at all concerned with what your internal problems are - be it computer or an untrained guy picking up the phone. I just want to order! The simplest alternative in case of technical issues is to take down the order on a paper and update it later. But No. Probably the guy was working according to a script and didn't know what to do when such a problem arose. It took me a full five minutes to order one pizza and one garlic bread. And believe me 5 minutes is a lot of time in the context of ordering on phone. Try calling the next door resturant. It hardly takes a minute. May be lack of technology can be a boon sometimes.

Next failure came at the time of delivery. In a business where competitors have a delivery time of less than 30 minutes, these people took One hour and 10 minutes including a reminder call to them after 50 minutes.

A very basic step while getting an address is to ask a landmark - which I believe in this case would have reduced the time significantly. But there was a failure on this part too.

The product though was good - a crispy and fresh pizza. But no matter how I like the product, it is the service that will lead me to think twice before dialing their number again!