Linens N Things has lost a customer this week.

They lost a customer for inadequately managing the customer's expectations in their online ordering and local store pickup process.  As a result, the customer is dissatisified and gone.  What happened?

LNT is guilty of being apathetic about managing customer expectations.  They rolled out a new service and expected the customer to automatically have the right service expectations.  They probably looked at the direct competition and thought they were ok.  Hey, Bed, Bath and Beyond doesn't do this, so we should be good to go.  

Note to the LNT Execs:  When you introduce a service similar to one your customers already use with someone else, the someone else is managing the customer expectations for that service.  

Unless you are rolling out a radically better service, you have to meet that same service expectation set by the other company in order to be judged successful.  Failure to do so will result in customer dissatisfaction with your company and potential customer loss.

In many cases, the company setting the service expectation is not your direct competitor or in your market.  For example, look at what Apple did to customer expectations around MP3 players.  All of a sudden, Creative and Sony didn't control customer expectations any longer and had to play catch up to meet the new expectations set by a personal computer maker. 

The customer doesn't see markets and segments, they only see products and services.   If your service looks like XYZ's, then the customer expectation is that it will work just like XYZ's.  If it doesn't, you should say explicitly how it's different.

LNT recently added the ability to browse and order products online and be able to pick up the product from the local store.  Good ole Click n Mortar service.  Cool.  We use this functionality with several different stores, so we were looking forward to using it.

In particular, we are long time customers of Circuit City.  Circuit City pioneered the click n mortar concept and in my opinion, has one of the best systems for this functionality, bar none. 

Circuit City has set my expectation to be able to pick up a product ordered online by the time I get to the store.  With having to load the kids and related support gear, it is usually about an hour between order and pickup.  They have yet to fail me and I'm always in and out with the products I've ordered.  I've always been a happy camper with their stores.

So, we've been looking at Roombas.  With cats and children, the carpet always has an interesting collection of things on it which need to be vacuumed up.  A robotic maid for this chore would be a perfect fit.

So this adventure started when my wife got an email from LNT saying their Roomba is listed at the lowest price we've seen anywhere.  Out comes the credit card and away goes the LNT order for the Roomba.  We leave to run errands as you can't yet order online from Target and Home Depot.  After 4 hours, we figured the Roomba should be ready to be picked up.  Hey, everywhere else we use this type of service, the product's been sitting there for about 3 hours.  We checked webmail on our cell and saw the confirmation email.  Yipee, we're about to be proud owners of a new robotic rugrat!

We walk in the store and there's a nice display of about 20 of those bad boys sitting there by the registers.  I ride herd on the kids while my wife goes off to score our new little red robot. 

She comes back a few minutes later, madder than a hornet.  It seems that LNT doesn't process the orders in real time.  The lady at the service counter said it could be 2-3 days before they fulfil the order and that they would call us to pick it up.  To make matters worse, the LNT person was a bit snippy about the whole affair as she seemed to think we were being unreasonable in our expectation of picking up our order a mere 4 hours after placing it. 

Based on her comments, we probably would have gotten the Roomba sooner if they had just shipped it to us or if we had just come to the store to get it.  Except now, they had our money and wouldn't give us the product.

We left, mad and empty handed.  We were standing in front of $4000 in inventory of the product we ordered and had proof of purchase, but couldn't get our order because of their kludgy process.  Strike one.

When we got home, my wife called the LNT 800 customer support line to cancel the order.  Guess what.  Once the order goes to the store, you can't cancel it.  Yep, you have to trot back to the store in 2-3 days after they get around to calling you to pick up the order.  Then you have to take it to the store's return desk to return it. 

Sweet!  Let's throw a little salt in the wound here, why don't you.  Not only did you take our money and not give us our order, but now you are going to make it a real pain for us to get our money back due to our dissatisfaction with your lousy process.  Strike two.

We also submitted a customer complaint email to the website.  We've not even received an email that the submission was received.  I mean, come on, LNT can't even set an autoresponder for this sort of submission to their mailbox?  Based on the email contents, I would have expected some sort of response from the company by now.  Strike three and you are out of there!

It will be the last time we ever go there and I'm taking the time to tell everyone I know about the experience. 

A side note.  We decided that we really needed the big Roomba, after re-reading the specs while grousing about LNT's crappy process and drinking coffee.  It's twice as much as the one we ordered from LNT.  We'll be visiting another retailer who will gladly give us the product for our money, after we get finished returning this one to LNT. 

Too bad Circuit City doesn't sell Roombas.