The customer service journey

How do we know that the customer service journey is good? It goes smoothly and seamlessly. We look online for the business, find an entry and we can book a table, a ticket, an appointment, a click-and-collect: the bookings process guides us through detailing our requirements and we are taken to payment and we are done. Or we next receive a calendar appointment that we can add to our diary to remind us that we have our session coming up. And then we are done. It is so easy that what might have taken an hour last century is done in seconds in this one. Bricks and mortar retailers have largely adapted to a hybrid environment, putting the power in their customer's hands with online bookings platforms, email, instant messaging, answer services, chat bots and smart payments (Lin & Cheng, 2025). This is called omnichannel marketing, where "customer touchpoints [...] occur through multiple channels[: ] face-to-face, phone, online, [and] mobile apps" (Babin & Harris, 2022, p. 107).

I ran into a complicated 20th century customer service journey recently, and it reminded me of just how smooth most customer service journeys are today. I needed to book an appointment for a family member at a local franchise business in the nearest small town, so I went to book online as I live 35 mins away on a good day; 45 on a not-so-good day. However, I was unable to find an online booking service for the entire franchise, let alone for the local branch.

OK. So I searched for a business email so I could email a request. Easy. Except there was no online email address that I could find. Anywhere.

Right. So this would need to be old school. I searched for the phone number, found one online, in two places (who uses a phone number?!). This was a retail business, and it was Saturday morning, so rang them, thinking they would probably be open. But there was no reply - no answer service, nothing. Just that ringing, on and on. Just in case it was a manual answer service, and the machine was already busy, I rang again. But I got the same result. OK, perhaps the business wasn’t open on the weekends. I would try during the week instead.

On Monday, I called again, and got no answer, and no answerphone message. Never mind omnichannel (Lin & Cheng, 2025), this place was not even mono-channel.

Gritting my teeth, and not feeling full of familial cheer, on Tuesday I got in the car and drove to the business. It was a not-so-good day, and took 45 minutes, due to two sets of stop/go roadworks and a transporter carrying a double-lane-wide shed being moved on the highway (hilarious). I arrived at the business was staggered to see the storefront had been gutted. There is no signage in the windows to say where the business has moved to. I entered the worksite and asked builders doing the fit out where the business had moved to, and they didn’t know either. It looked like business had gone OUT of business. 

What was worse was that, as a customer myself as well as my other family member, I had received no communication that the business was closing, or moving, or temporarily closing and moving. I was in the dark.

I thought about going to a similar business which was just over the road. But, I was on an errand for a family member. I knew there was another franchise another half hour further away, so I called them - despite thinking that this wouldn't get me anywhere as I assumed that the two businesses were run independently. But they don't appear to be franchises: it sounds like they may just be separate branches (but I am still unsure). I was told that the business nearest me was moving to a new location, but would be closed for three months (three MONTHS!). The staff appear to be working in the other branch for now. 

All in all it took me six goes to get in touch with them. If I hadn't been doing this for a family member, I wouldn't have made a special trip, and I would have gone elsewhere on finding the business closed. Most customers will not try more than two or three times. 

Wow. This was a classic missed opportunity to advise customers what was happening. They could have gone old school and simply had a phone answer or service/message stating "please contact the X branch on xxx-xxx-xxxx, as this branch will be reopening in new premises in xxx on ..." and not even taking messages. That might have cost them $30 a month at business rates (and they probably could have negotiated much less than that). Or just as easily, they could have forwarded their branch phone to the other branch. 

For just a few cents, they could have put a relocation notice on the old store front, and left the shop outfitters a brief statement - or a few flyers - to share with any customers asking questions. Or they could have negotiated with the new business to stick a flyer box on the window of the old premises to hold flyers until the new business was open. 

In addition, also at very low cost, they could have put a relocation notice on the two sites where I found their phone number (and perhaps updating the contact details to other branch temporarily).

They could have invested a little more, and have someone in the business create a short script, then paid a school leaver to email everyone the business had an email address for; text everyone who has a cellphone number listed; and call everyone on a landline who hadn't yet been contacted.

And they should definitely look at getting an online bookings service, to put the power in the hands of the customers. 

But the story gets a bit worse. I needed to get some paperwork to them from my family member, so needed the other branch email address. They carefully read out a quite complex email address which was all numbers, unrelated words and a domain name and a country unrelated to the actual name of the business and its location. We treble-checked it. It seemed to me to be a B2B mail address, not a C2B. Why on earth hadn't this been rerouted to an appropriate business domain with a clear address by their IT people? Even info@business.co.nz would have been better than the jumble that I carefully recorded and read back. I could see why the email address was not normally shared with customers: it was not fit for purpose. We are 26 years into the 21st century - email is not new technology! I got my first email address in 1992; over a generation ago.

And it turned out the other branch had given me the email address of the closed branch: and it bounced. I had to call back to ask if there was another email address. Apparently the mailbox was full 🤦🏼‍♀️. I got another, similar email, and we went through the treble-checking again. I finally got the email sent.

Then when I went to pay for the service that was to be provided, I needed to pay a deposit. I asked for their banking details, but the business does not have bank transfer facilities or any online payment channels. I could either spend two hours there and back in the car to manually use a credit or debit card, or give them the details over the phone. It was - of course - the phone. 

This business, if they don't get their act together, are going to be no more in fairly short order. All that investment in their new premises will be pointless when considering the erosion of the client base. They need to urgently expand their communication channels, until they too are an omnichannel business. And that will hopefully mean that their customer service journey is delightful, not a series of - in the words of the old woman to the Knight from the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer, 1400, l. 1000) - "you can't get there from here"'s.

Sam

References:

Babin, B. J., & Harris, E. G. (2022). CB Consumer Behaviour (9th ed.). Cengage Canada.

Lyrics Translate. (2026). The Wife of Bath's Tale [from G. Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales]. https://lyricstranslate.com/en/geoffrey-chaucer-wife-baths-tale-lyrics.html

Lin, S. W., & Cheng, K. T. (2025). Exploring the Impact of Omnichannel Service Attributes on Consumer Well-Being Across the Customer Journey. SSRN. Advance online publication, 1-33. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.538245