How Carrefour sells you customised greetings cards

A photographer friend recently took some pictures of Gema and myself and the CD arrived yesterday.

I had been eagerly awaiting the CD because I wanted to have customised New Year greeting cards done with a photo of the two of us. I duly took the CD to my local Carrefour because I knew they had a Kodak machine in their photography section which could handle the job.

In all, it should have taken me no more than thirty minutes, but in the end, I left Carrefour almost three hours later, €21 out of pocket and without anything to show for it.

I have attempted to model what appears to be Carrefour’s business process for handling the situation. Click here to see the diagram. The diagram does not contain every detail, as the process involved even more frustration, but the esssential details are there.

Note to purists: this is not meant to be a BPMN-compliant diagram – it is just a story-telling device.

Takeaways:

• Carrefour: your customers are entitled to assume that you will provide them with a complete service in any given area (after all, you wouldn’t sell a bicycle without including tyres in the price and then try to tell the client that you don’t even have any tyres of the appropriate size and then try to blame the customer for not checking that the tyres were in stock before buying the bicycle and then refusing to refund the cost of the bicycle).
• Carrefour: provide your customers with a complete service in any given area
• Customers: question everything before you buy at Carrefour, because their customer service is rubbish