We've talked a lot about the fundamentals of customer experience on this site. We've also talked about how operational issues cause customer experience compromise. Unfortunately, as most of us know, it's easy to miss the boat on these fronts.

While I'm sure there's more to the story, I thought I'd share this potentially great example of these dynamics at play. I got this rather compelling email from Old Navy today:


About 10 minutes later, I decided to surf to Old Navy and save. I opened up the email and clicked - and got a 404 error. I then clicked five places of the email and got a "Server not responding" error. I checked my internet connection and clicked once more, where I got this page:



The message reads "We're updating our site to bring you a better shopping experience. Old Navy is temporarily closed for scheduled site maintenance..."

Planned site maintenance? In tandem with the release a large push email?

I'm sure there's more to the story than this, but it sounds like one of two things happened: Either 1) The development and marketing departmental silos aren't communicating well together in an effort to coordinate outbound marketing with planned site maintenance... or 2) perhaps Old Navy's site went down due to an overwhelming response to the email.

In the latter case, it appears Old Navy only has one error screen to use when the site goes down. It basically says "We're closed, and we planned this." That's a pretty rude message for a customer who was JUST invited shopping! If the site did go down (and hey - it happens) wouldn't it be better for Old Navy to have an alternative error message for non-planned outages that says something this:

"We're sorry - the site is temporarily unavailable. To compensate for your inconvenience, we'll give you an additional 10% off your next order. Just use this code when you check out: 123ERROR. Print this now and check back with us later to save even more! Thanks and apologies from your friends at Old Navy."

Better to recover those shoppers at a cost than have them forget to come back, right? Not so hard to do, either.

Based on my estimation, the site was down for about 2 hours ... It's back up now. I can't help but wonder how much this little snaffu cost Old Navy today?

Getting the fundamentals of experience right can't be overstated. It requires cross-departmental communication, coordination and scenario planning. When this doesn't happen, it wastes corporate energy, burns revenue and has the potential to seriously damage customer relationships. Of course, I'll go back to Old Navy... this is just a good "food for thought" example.