Peloton, take my money. On second thought…
We’ll talk about Peloton in a sec – bear with me.
For Covid Thanksgiving, I decided to order a complete meal from a local restaurant. I wanted to support them because their food is locally sourced and delicious. The menu sounded delectable, and the price couldn’t be beat: five courses would feed five people for $75. The scheduled delivery time would occur on Thanksgiving Day between noon and 4pm.
Sweet! All I had to worry about was what wine to choose.
Thanksgiving Day, we nibbled a little, knowing that we would be feasting later. But as the day wore on, 4pm came and went with no food delivery. We couldn’t reach the restaurant for an update. At 6:30pm, completely hangry at this point, I got in my car and drove over there. The poor young woman at the counter had clearly been crying. Having spent eight years as a waiter, I knew how horribly things could go wrong in a kitchen.
The staff hastily packed my bag of items and handed it over. While I was frustrated, I’m an empathetic CX person, so I decided to just go home and enjoy the long-awaited dinner.
Once home, I unpacked the bag. Everything was cold and had to be reheated. What’s worse there was NO PIE and NO STUFFING! Like, Thanksgiving is not Thanksgiving without PIE and STUFFING! I called the restaurant and they actually answered this time. A lot of pies had burned, and they ran out of stuffing earlier in the day.
Why do I tell my tale of culinary woe when I’m supposed to be writing about Peloton? Because good CX is all about making promises and following through on them. Even more importantly, it’s about communication when the promise will not be equal to the execution.
Dear Peloton: do you see the train wreck coming? Don’t just turn your back and pretend it isn’t happening.
At my company, there was a clear division between the Peloton haves and have-nots. Covid isolation created a zealous group of Pelotoners who talked frequently (like, a lot) about their morning rides, their competitions with each other, and their subsequent smoothie recipes. The FOMO they created was real. Even I was tempted, though I live in a tiny house and the thing would take up the majority of my living room.
Peloton and other home-gym equipment skyrocketed in sales post-Covid shutdown. Peloton made roughly $1.8 billion in sales for 2020, a roughly 100 percent increase from the $910 million in sales the company made in 2019. However, towards the end of 2020, the expensive bike company started to lag in delivery times, causing great consternation among the Amazon-primed market that expects everything to be delivered within two days.
The social media hate has spread widely, and Peloton is now in a position of not only confronting angry customers, but also revealing how little prepared they were for a failure of this magnitude. Automated emails about delays convey no personalization or recourse. There are also reports of finger-pointing at delivery partners rather than taking ownership of the problem. I can only imagine the living hell that is the life of a Peloton customer service rep in this situation.
Amazon has created a monster-sized expectation for fulfillment of promises. Two-day, and often one-day, shipping is a given. If they are low on or out of stock, they make it very clear in red font. Peloton not only made promises that it couldn’t – quite literally – deliver, but they also failed to own up to their mistakes, and they didn’t enable their employees to do anything other than pass the buck.
Home gyms will not go away entirely once the world returns to normalcy, but the price tag of a Peloton plus monthly membership fee will start to look far less like a need and more like a nice-to-have because of this horrible customer experience.
I paid for a five-course meal for Thanksgiving. I got three. I won’t be going to that restaurant again because they didn’t communicate with me. That’s how this works. You make me a promise. If you don’t deliver due to extenuating circumstances and you let me know about it, I will likely forgive you. However, if you dodge and weave and act like there’s nothing to see here, then I can easily get my pie and stuffing elsewhere.