Note: This month I’m reprising some older posts on branding. The Safeway program referenced may well work better now, but it was enough of a hassle that I never got engaged. Such is the power of a negative experience in a time-pressured world.
I am an unashamed cheapskate, so when I heard about Safeway’s recently launched Just 4 U program, I thought “Great! I love to save money on groceries.”
The details of the program seemed a touch complex; still, I went ahead and signed up. I started getting emails immediately, exhorting me to load up my Safeway card with items I normally buy and to visit the coupon center on the Safeway.com site. There, they said, I would find bargains on a veritable cornucopia of comestibles and household supplies.
Then the fun began. First, my password was rejected, so I called Customer Service, bailing after 15 minutes on hold. A couple of days later, I tried again and got through to a nice woman who told me my email address wasn’t in the system. Huh? She fixed that problem, walked me through a few tweaks to Firefox, and generated a temporary password. (I tried it 24 hours later, as directed, and it didn’t work.) During our conversation, she confided that there had been quite a few problems with the program.
Safeway, like a lot of smart companies, wants to build and maintain brand loyalty. And its execs probably thought that Just 4 U would help the organization stay closer to customers. It seems that they may have rushed it into production prematurely, though.
Will this stumble do lasting damage to the Safeway brand? Of course not. But I tend to agree with the person the Customer Service rep mentioned—the one who said, “This is really not simple at all. Why don’t you guys just reduce prices across the board and be done with it?”
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