Dive Brief:
- Office Depot is promising to fulfill online and mobile orders for in-store and curbside pickup orders within 15 minutes, the retailer announced Monday.
- Should an order not be ready within 15 minutes, Office Depot will send customers a $15 coupon within 72 hours to be used on their next qualifying purchase. The guarantee is now available at Office Depot and OfficeMax stores nationwide.
- “At Office Depot, we’re committed to providing the fastest and easiest shopping experience in the nation for our customers,” Kevin Moffitt, president of Office Depot, said in a prepared statement. “Our 15-Minute Pickup Promise is designed to deliver convenience and peace of mind so that customers can get what they need — when they need it — and focus on what matters most.”
Dive Insight:
Office Depot joins a slew of other companies offering service guarantees. While some, like AT&T, have found success with these offerings, others like Domino's ultimately decided the downsides offset the benefits.
“These kinds of guarantees for physical goods are meant to create competitive differentiation by feeding customers’ desires for reliability and (nearly) instant gratification,” Judy Weader, principal analyst at Forrester, said in an email.
For Office Depot, a 15-minute service window makes it stand out from the pack. Most retailers’ buy now, pick up in-store guarantees run between one to two hours, Weader said.
“As long as the promises baked into these guarantees can be kept, customers should feel more confident about doing business with these brands, particularly since the short time window creates some assurance that the retailer can help with urgent needs,” Weader said.
Not all services and products are included in the guarantee, however. Same-day print services, for example, are excluded.
AT&T is another recent company that launched a service guarantee. As part of the promise launched this winter, the mobile service provider said that customers who are routed to technical support assistance will speak to an agent within five minutes or be offered a callback for their time of choosing. In July, AT&T CEO John Stankey said the guarantee is winning customers and improving satisfaction.
But service guarantees are not without risk. Domino’s ended its 30-minute promise years ago in part because of concerns that delivery drivers had to drive recklessly to deliver pizzas within the allotted window, Weader said.
“If Office Depot, Office Max employees can’t consistently pick and pack the orders in 15 minutes, whether based on order size, inventory checking, staffing shortfalls, etc., then they’re not set up to be successful,” Weader said. “Hopefully, that was a consideration when determining the 15-minute timeframe.”
