Telephone companies, cable operators and such refer to the “last mile” as the final step of actually getting their service into a home or office. For marketing companies, the “last mile” is the process of actually delivering the product or service to the customer—and that’s where more and more companies fall short, perhaps intentionally.
Infoweek columnist Chad Dickerson describes a situation in which a hotel reservation was not honored because the “last mile” procedure of the online booking company was to send a fax to the participating hotel, where it was ignored. My wife had the experience of ordering expensive curtains from a company called Smith and Noble, whose “last mile” procedure when a customer complains about a missing order is to send an email to the factory and hope they respond. (This outfit couldn’t even CANCEL an order efficiently; when they still hadn’t delivered the drapes for our little vacation cabin on the next-to-last day of our stay, she was assured the order would be shipped that night overnight or not at all. Neither promise turned out to be true; our friendly neighbor signed for the package a few days later and the curtains now sit uselessly in a closet. Sure hope they fit when we show up next year…)
As to intentional disappointments, this is what happens when a company looks for ways to cut costs and finds that it can save big by lowering expectations or simply failing to meet them for the small percentage of orders that are more expensive to fulfill. This is happening now at my beloved Amazon.com, whose “Prime Shipping”—two-day shipping at no extra cost beyond a yearly fee, and overnight shipping for $3.99—is I predict destined to be a one-season wonder.
When Amazon consistently failed to get a Prime order to me in 2 days, AND email customer service failed to reach a solution or adequately explain the problem, I wrote a detailed letter to Jeff Bezos. (As a practice this is what I recommend as a final step to get a resolution from a company; if the CEO (or someone else with responsibility) fails to respond or sends you a form letter, that tells you as much as if they fixed the problem.)
In my case I got a personal response from a personal representative of Jeff’s, but she got both the shipping date and the item description wrong—data that was readily available in Amazon’s own files, of course. Trouble in the last mile which presages more disappointments down the road…