Last night we were ordering some food for the week and Thanksgiving weekend from Coborns Delivers as we usually do, and the site started to get really slow and unresponsive. I’m sure everyone was doing what we were: trying to get an order in before the holiday. Adding items to the cart was taking upwards of 15 seconds, and we were getting catastrophic server errors when we tried to check out.
What happened next was what every retailer doesn’t want to happen; my wife abandoned the cart and went to the Lunds & Byerlys site and placed an order for our groceries. Overloaded servers cost them our order, and I’m sure it cost them them more as well.
Today, a customer service rep from Coborns called and apologized about the server problems. I mentioned that I understood why the site was probably overloaded, and the representative offered to get our order out to us today. I explained we abandoned our cart and ordered from Lunds. The rep apologized again, and told us that we would have a credit to our account, and a free delivery as well.
Coborns understands that a positive user experience is more than just making shopping for food easy — they have metrics and logs that reveal when people don’t complete orders (or aren’t able to, in our case), know why, and offer to make it up to the customer after a bad experience.
Update: They’re also listening on Twitter: @cobornsdelivers. I found an account that might by Byerlys but it doesn’t appear to be in use.