The year 2020 was not a good year for most businesses. However, some businesses were hit way worse than others. Businesses like supermarkets, movie theatres, and other brick and mortar stores had to face the brunt of the lockdown because of restrictions on travel, gatherings, and more. However, most big-name supermarkets had apps of their own, and others were quick in developing them to grapple with the growing online demand.
However, the difficulties of the pandemic did lead to an increased number of complaints from customers and after analyzing Lidl complaints and complaints from other supermarkets, we came up with some of the most common ones.
Lack of technological awareness
One of the biggest problems, supermarkets faced was in serving most of their older patrons who neither knew much about operating their apps nor did they have anyone at home to make it easier for them. This led to quite some loss in their sales.
Returns
Product returns shot up a lot during the pandemic. There were various reasons for this. For example, in the case of ordering fresh produce or fruits, the customers felt they were good enough and needed to be returned. One of the major reasons was the lack of appropriate inventory. This resulted in a lot of people getting brands which they don’t use or brands they didn’t select. As a result, a lot of them ended up sending that stuff back. One of the biggest rises was seen in John Lewis complaints and other such stores which sell a lot of clothes. As you can guess, clothes are some of the most returned items even after being tried out in stores. During the pandemic, with people having to order them online, it just increased the chances of advertising being misleading, sizes not fitting, customers finding the quality not up to the mark and more. All in all, the supermarkets lost a lot more man hours in handling returns than they would usually do.
Different customer instructions
Every customer had different instructions for their orders. While some were okay with the driver delivering the goods to their hands, some wanted the drivers to leave it on their porch. Some people had other designated spaces to keep their items in, and then there were some who didn’t believe there was an actual pandemic going on. All of this let to a lot of confusion among delivery executives, leading to less and less customer satisfaction.
No entry without masks
Once total lockdown started being lifted and stores and supermarkets were allowed to remain open with a limit on the number of people inside, it was a government instruction that no one should be allowed without a mask, and for good reason. However, a lot of customers too adversely to this and there were a large number of arguments, sometimes even physical altercations, which happened because the customers didn’t want their ‘free will’ to be taken away. While this wasn’t something directly faced by the supermarket bigwigs, it did cause a lot of trouble for almost all customer desk executives.
