Grocery delivery service, Ocado, launches text reminders
Excellent idea. Retail Bulletin is reporting that Ocado have launched a text reminder service for their customers. This, I reckon, is a critical aid for both Ocado and the customer. There’s nothing worse than heading out somewhere because you thought you were free for the afternoon, only to get a mobile call from the ‘driver’ asking if you’ll be home in 15 minutes to receive your delivery. Cue creative excuse as Ocado co-founder Jason Gissing explains:
“Over two thirds of our customers work and roughly the same proportion have children so they are some of the busiest people in the country. It’s easy to understand why they occasionally forget that we’re due to deliver. Whilst most people genuinely forget because their busy, we have had situations where customers admit to more creative reasons for not being in when we show up - from being whisked off on romantic getaways to organising deliveries of their own in the labour ward.”
Ocado should miss less customers as a result and customers should be more prepared to receive!
Key point: Can you reply to the text message you receive? I’m willing to bet the answer is no, for the time being. I’ll check with Ocado.
The holy grail here would be the facility to reply to the text and reschedule the delivery — and do everything you’d normally do by phone, by text.
I really like Ocado (we order all our supermarket shopping from them), but I won’t be using their text reminders…. because their confirmation e-mails already have a calendar event attached to them that gets sucked into my calendar and synced to my handsets without any intervention from me.
Still, next time I do some shopping I’ll keep and eye out for it and let you know how it goes! This could be a great addition to their service for people who don’t have a proper calendar setup.
Posted by Dan Lane on February 8th, 2008 at 8:35 pm.Lets face it - the vast majority of people do not synch their handsets. In fact the vast majority of people do not even keep an electronic calendar
Posted by Julian on February 9th, 2008 at 12:47 am.SMS remains the most pervasive medium available and will remain so for a good 10 years - that’s why this type of service is so useful.