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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rupert1 who wrote (58178)	4/16/1999 12:55:00 PM
From: Loki	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 97611

victor...O'Brien and Bauman on CNBC just mentioned another Houston company in which we might like to invest.....RICK A chain of topless bars in Houston 1. Maybe we'll see Mason and Pfeiffer there 2. The company has more visibility than CPQ 3. Company has a nice "profile" Loki

To: rupert1 who wrote (58178)	4/16/1999 8:04:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 97611

Victor - I assume that your response was in jest, but I spoke with a person who actually works the compaq.com site and got some background on how they work (she knew nothing about this particular incident). I discovered that your analysis is actually not too far from the mark. The administration of the web site (the pictures and product detail) is fairly complex given the number of products that CPQ offers. As the writer said, the site is easy to navigate and offers a lot of choices. Even when a product is discontinued, people who have bought the product may want the options associated with it. Removing the product and its links creates confusion for those customers, so instead CPQ linked to a real-time inventory system which will not allow an on-line order for a product which is not in stock. The system is supposed to indicate this to the customer when he attempts to select the out-of-stock product for purchase. Maybe this is what the Barrons author meant by "it just didn't work". Perhaps "out of stock" was too esoteric a term for him to understand. They then called directly. The sales person evidently told the customer that the product was no longer being made and there was no stock, and attempted an "upscale sell" - try to sell a model which has better features at a higher price. The DELL web site does upscale selling automatically and all of the sales people also use this technique - the online equivalent of "Fries with that?" selling. The customer was evidently irate at being offered the opportunity to spend more money and instead demanded the out-of-stock discontinued item. Amazingly enough, the salesperson he was speaking to actually found one for him - I have no idea how this was done since the phone lines are not near any physical inventory. The clerk must have had to call a real warehouse, get some harassed stockman to go and physically search to see if even though the inventory showed zero, perhaps there was actually one still in stock. The "manufacturing" in this case is a final test to assure quality, any final configuration required for the order, and packaging for shipment. So this is already a "special" - a computer which was out of the system but physically exists. The clerk has no easy way to get it back into the system, a requirement to actually get it packaged up and shipped. This requires intervention by the IT staff who maintain the system. But to compound matters, our "customer from hell" had given the wrong phone number, so when this special intervention, requiring a number of CPQ employees to work outside of the system to provide a customer with a discontinued model, did not execute with the normal delivery speed, they had no easy way to inform the customer. CPQ also attempts to verify the validity of the credit cards with a combination of address and phone number - there is a substantial amount of credit card fraud, and unlike in-store transactions, merchants are not protected from the costs of fraud on mail-order business (and on-line transactions fall under that category). This verification also protects the customer, at least from the hassle of clearing up a fraudulent charge. Even after all of this, once the charge and delivery information was corrected, the product arrived within 10 days. This may not be perfect execution but it is far from a horror story. I worked behind the customer service desk at Sears when I was in school, and we encountered the "customer from hell" on a daily basis. No matter how outrageous their demands, no matter how transparent their story about how they had been abused at the hands of this or that salesperson, we always did whatever it took to give them satisfaction. Sometimes there were legitimate mistakes made by store people but most often it was the customer who had overlooked something obvious in the process and wanted someone else to blame for his ignorance. That experience is now many years in the past but it taught me to be patient with people on the other side of the desk. I have one experience a month with them, they have hundreds a day with people like me and one can only guess what the previous 99 were like.