Destroying Customer Goodwill - with Technology

Sunday night, Tracie and I wanted a good hamburger.  We didn’t want to go out…and we didn’t have any hamburger meat at home.

So…being the clever person I am, I decided I needed to 1) drive out and pick something up or 2) figure out how to make hamburgers appear from nothingness.

I haven’t got my sorcery badge complete yet, so I chose option #1.

I remembered that our favorite local burger joint Mooyah offered online ordering.  Brilliant! I can sit on my tookus and order my burgers…then drive down (again…on said tookus) and pick them up via curbside pickup.

I fired up the browser and landed on Mooyah’s website and easily found the ‘order online’ option and started placing my order. I entered my zip code, then selected my local store.

Then…I was presented with an ‘order setup’ option that looked like the screenshot below  – notice the content inside the red box:

So….I could either pick up my order or I could do something else…but I’m not sure what. Clicking in the box, I realized it was for a phone number, so i entered my phone number.

Then went ahead and clicked through to the next screen…and got an error message (below).

So…I tried again and this time I got through to an ordering screen.

I entered order #1. Then Order #2. Easy Peasy.

Then, I was asked to sign in or sign up for an account. After many attempts, I finally got my profile filled out.

Now…it was time to checkout…10 minutes after I started the checkout process.

And had my credit card declined. Tried again. Same thing. Weird.  So..I tried another card. and another.  All declined.

After the last credit card was declined, I think i said something that wasn’t appropriate for polite company.

After 15 minutes of trying to order, I was frustrated and hungry. I had wasted 15 minutes of my life trying to order a couple of stupid hamburgers.

I decided to get into my car and go down to the Mooyah and place an order to go…but half-way there, I decided to not give them a dime of my money and went to a Sonic instead.

The next day – an email was sent and a phone call made to the company….with no response.

More than a rant

This is more than a rant.  This is learning opportunity for all of us.

If you are going to offer a service like this, make sure it works.  In all my searching, I couldn’t find another burger joint close to my house that offered the option to order online…that’s a differentiator for Mooyah that they used against themselves.

Here was a burger joint using technology to allow a customer to order in the way that made that customer most comfortable….and that ordering system doesn’t work.  Not only did it not work, it took way too long to setup an order and place it.

I would have been perfectly fine placing an order over the phone and going to pick it up – but they offered me an online ordering system….so I used it.

Mooyah’s intentions were good…they just don’t have the system(s) in place to deliver.

The moral of this story – Don’t use technology just to use technology. If you do…you may end up loosing a customer or customers over it.  Mooyah went from being our favorite burger joint to being a place that I’m ranting about.

Oh…and those Sonic burgers…much better than Mooyah’s.  By far.

Image Credit: RANT, this way By Nesster on flickr