Need:
None. Availing a free gift offer received from Cleartrip
Expectation:
To be able to create a photo collage mug with multiple pictures easily. I am a member of Snapfish by HP which has an easy-to-use interface and my experience with HP increased my expectation from other photo sites as a result of which I expected Zoomin also to have an easy-to-use interface. I also expected the shipping of the coffee mug to be fast and safe. Also, safety of the site was a concern as I expected to pay shipping charges with my credit card and as a result wanted a secure connection for the same. Uploading pictures to the site meant I expected high amount of storage space as well a facility to synchronize my pictures with the site (something like Picassa with its offline tool). I did not want to select every single image I had to upload one after the other.
Experience:
During the course of my Summer Internship, I had booked multiple Flight Tickets on Cleartrip. On two of those transactions, I got a coupon for a Free Photo Collage Mug from Zoomin. This offer was valid till 30th June 2009 and being a true MBA working on the last minute, I availed the offer on 30th June 2009. The experience with Zoomin began with a lengthy registration form and an even lengthier photo uploading process. Not only was the photo uploading process inconvenient, it was also limited in terms of the size of the picture and other such flexibilities available on other similar services. But, this was just the beginning of my dissatisfaction from the experience. After tedious efforts, I was finally able to upload enough pictures to select from for a decent photo collage for the mug. But of course in order to create the mug, I first had to find the suitable links as the website was not user-friendly and I had to literally read the offer mail and follow it step-by-step to order the mug. Once I reached the required web-page, I decided to make a picture collage with multiple pictures of all my friends. But, I should’ve guessed that the inflexibility would continue here and I could put a maximum of 8 pictures on the mug in 2 4X4 matrices on either side. This further increased my dissatisfaction as other photo collage mugs that I have, have over 12-15 pictures on them. Suddenly I was faced with the task of reducing the number of pictures from the vast selection I had uploaded after herculean efforts. Finally, I completed the collage and ordered the mug and after paying the shipping charges was informed that the mug would reach me by 5th of July 2009.
Expecting to receive an update from Zoomin when the order was shipped (the site informed me that they will send me an email once the order is shipped), I checked my mails regularly for the same. However, till 6th of July there was no such email from Zoomin. Finally on 7th July, I logged in to Zoomin again to check the status of my order and it showed the status as shipped on 6th of July. My expectations had fallen considerably by that time and I was pleasantly surprised to see that at least the order had been shipped. I finally received my photo collage coffee mug and can now say goodbye to the cumbersome site and service Zoomin.
Service Analysis:
The above figure summarizes the analysis of the service in terms of the Service Trinity based on my experience. The analysis for Employee Management is not applicable as I did not interact with any employees during my experience.
Service Quality
In order to determine the perceived service quality of the Zoomin Online Shopping service the five dimensions of service quality (SERVQUAL) have been used. These dimensions are given in the table below along with the quality perceived by me during my experience.
| Dimension | Rating (Scale of 1-10) 1 – Poor; 10 - Excellent | Analysis of Service |
| Tangibles | 5 | The website and the final delivered product are the only tangibles of the service and the website is not user-friendly or convenient. |
| Reliability | 5 | The inability of an automated system to send a mail about shipping of the order as well as the inconvenience caused during the time considerably reduced the reliability of the service. |
| Responsiveness | 3 | Although I did not interact with the employees, the failure in sending information at the right time, particularly for shipping the order, showed low responsiveness. |
| Assurance | 4 | Very Low credibility for the brand due to the poor experience. Also since I had no prior experience with the brand, I did not have any experience which may have helped increase the credibility. Security is high for the online payment, but this is a requirement for all websites where any payment needs to be made and this security is maintained by outside agencies. The security of the pictures uploaded is however a concern for me. |
| Empathy | - | Since I did not interact with the staff, I cannot comment on this aspect. |
Your opinion and comments are welcome.
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