Maggi Noodles: BigBasket & Nestle - Unhappy Customer Story!

Maggi Noodles: BigBasket & Nestle - Unhappy Customer Story!

Tags: Maggi Noodles BigBasket Big Basket Nestle Customer Experience Complaint Shopping Online Grocery Service Delivery Refund Vegetables Quality Discounts Credit Card Bill Pulses Shahrukh Khan Brand Advertising Feedback Regulators Government

For a long time, we had been shopping with online grocery major at www.BigBasket.com. When it was first launched in our city, we were elated and excited for many reasons. We could shop online in our own city with a reliable service provider and get our groceries delivered at our doorstep! If something were not in order, we could easily raise a complaint and get items either replaced or cancelled for a full refund! It meant saving lot of time, effort and transport costs, not to mention the fact that we can avoid the hustle and bustle of crowds in grocery stores. Of course, sometimes, it is relevant to visit physical stores just to keep in touch with the latest but not always, especially when we know exactly what we want! While we could still make one full visit to a brick and mortar grocery store every now and then, yet the rest of shopping could be online!

Further, during initial launch of Big Basket, one key feature was online shopping of vegetables! Their quality was good with reasonable pricing - so that helped too. It was also good from another perspective - the portal offered good discounts on credit card shopping to the tune of 20% in the first few days of the month. Who can refuse that when your bill gets lighter, time gets saved, effort lessens and fuel cost comes down? It was, in our opinion, a deal-maker or clincher! This entire model practically worked for us! We were happy. We were able to persuade our family to move to this concept successfully though initially it was challenging with few Senior Members of the family.

However, in recent times, the product quality and customer experience appears to have clearly gone downhill. The quality of vegetables, more often than not, is poor and we have given up shopping for them online through Big Basket portal. We also observed that sometimes pulses were pest ridden - this was not so in earlier times. It seems to us customers that Big Basket has moved away from its rigorous quality control model it had when it launched and is focussing more on numbers. It is interesting that they have signed up Shahrukh Khan for their brand advertising at high expense but do not feel that it is more important to ensure good product mix, quality control and proactive customer experience and mitigation. Perhaps, they have routed the budget in these areas to high expense advertising by Shahrukh Khan. Many a time, we have noticed celebrities advertising for brands irresponsibly but not assessing their quality! Anyway, that is another story.

Maggi Noodles: BigBasket & Nestle India - A Not So Happy Customer Story!

And now the latest experience - poor quality of Maggi Noodles! Maggi Noodles packets were delivered to us by Big Basket which were long past the expiry / best before date (BVZO-38696263-010118 - 2 January 2018). The contents themselves appeared to be scraggly and broken. The packaging looked dusty and not giving the appearance of new stock and edible food. So we requested replacement (EVZRO-38758086-020118 - 3 January 2018) when the customer service team requested us to give them another chance! We were however in for another rude shock when replacements came. This time the packages had micro holes and leaked pieces of dry noodles on the table and floor! God knows if they were also infested considering that packaging was not air tight and had micro holes! We were rather annoyed and returned them immediately. On both occasions, we took action in the presence of delivery agents of Big Basket. It is surprising that a follow-up action based on a serious customer complaint leads to another severe complaint. Normally, companies do take care it does not happen. So we are puzzled on how Big Basket can be so casual in their approach in resolving a customer complaint!

We are unsure whom to hold responsible and accountable for this bad experience - should it be Big Basket or Nestle? In the past, Maggi Noodles (a product of Nestle) had a very bad run with food regulators and were banned for some time. They are just now returning to form. The downturn in their sales took a serious toll on the bottom-line of Nestle. The company announced that it had taken a slew of measures so that such occurrences do not happen again. But here we are with a set of complaints! So definitely Nestle is responsible for quality control of its products as Big Basket is their agent. On a similar note, Big Basket is a stockist and therefore, it is accountable too for ensuring strict quality control of the products in its portfolio. If it encounters issues, its quality mechanisms should weed them out and revert feedback to Nestle rather than serve it to customers!

An email exchange followed with both Big Basket and Nestle conveying our serious disappointment and requesting connect with Senior Management. Unfortunately, both parties were not bothered and have not even properly responded or mitigated the bad customer experience, except to offer an apology! This is another disturbing trend of corporates offering apologies to customers and assuming that the matter is closed! It is like corporates feel they have done a big deal or favour by offering an apology to customers and therefore, customers should no longer bother them anymore thus considering the matter closed. Interestingly, we feel that it is part of a template / script that agents are given when they receive customer complaints. Their responses are rather robotic and automatic with no heart or real intent in it!

Maggi Noodles: BigBasket & Nestle - Unhappy Customer Story!

Well, the matter is not closed! As customers, we are still unhappy! We are not satisfied with just an apology that holds no meaning to our corporate friends unless they are backed by serious believable action that customers can see tangibly and appreciate! We were once loyal customers of both Big Basket and Nestle. We still shop with them but no longer with the same trusted mentality. We triple check what we receive from them as we are the end users and need to be doubly careful. It is a sad trend that companies these days are losing their value for corporate ethics, professionalism, quality control and positive customer experience. They apparently are concerned only with the sales numbers and nothing else. We customers also seem to be unduly tolerant of such errant malpractices - perhaps we are too trusting that companies will do us right!

These are the kind of experiences that turn customers away from brands when, firstly, they experience something bad and then there is no real follow-up action to thoroughly mitigate such experiences. For example - neither Big Basket nor Nestle have even connected us to an escalation point to impress on us that the matter is being taken seriously. Instead, they have just ignored it and brushed it under the carpet! When we specifically asked for an escalation, there was absolutely no response or we were simply flooded with scripted and templated emails. We are still following up but do not expect anything much. Best to keep expectations low since in our country, the concept of severe penalties on such defaulting companies is rather weak. It is high time that tangible steps and practical ones at that are taken by Governments and regulators to severely penalise such defaulting companies. It works in Western economies...

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