Home shopping for groceries has been common in most parts of the world for many years. I have been marketing books, electronics and other products as an Associate of Amazon USA and UK from 1996 onwards. These operations have worked seamlessly!
In Finland, online grocery shopping is a relatively “new” phenomenon. One of the largest Finnish groups, SOK Corporation, offers online grocery shopping through is shops as Sale snd Sokos Herkku Oulu (along with their associated S-Pankki banking service) .
They have contracted a service, foodie.fi, which belongs to an organization Digital Foodie Oy, to execute the operation on their behalf.
Online banking and credit card providers as S-Pankki, Nordea Bank, other major banks and credit and debit card providers are involved with the payment operations!
Last Friday I was admitted to the Oulu University Central Hospital for major surgery. I was likely to be hospitalised at least for a week.
My wife suffers from Alzheimer’s. She is the caregiver for our 47 year old youngest son. (Other children live abroad.)
I did the important grocery shopping for my wife and son on Thursday to ensure she was okay over the weekend. I intended to use the foodie.fi app to order groceries from Sokos Herkku Oulu, something which I had done seamlessly in January 2019 when I had a couple of my toes amputated.
I found the updated foodie.fi app to be totally unplanned and cumbersome. I would probably have given it a rating of less than 1 star. For instance, buttons which should be there are not there.
One of the first buttons on a shopping page would be “Add to Shopping Cart”! Such a button does not exist on the foodie.fi page. One has to figure out how to add an item to the shopping cart! Foodie.fi developers may be very clever but to expect ignorant people like me to have their level of intelligence may be asking too much?
And the actions that take place when certain buttons are clicked are totally incomprehensible!
With a great deal of difficulty I managed to put 47 items in my shopping basket and I was then ready for checkout.
In January 2019 it had been a simple process and my VISA debit card from Nordea Bank had been charged automatically when checking out!
Not so this time. When I filled in the card details, I was taken to the Nordea Bank page which gave me three options to enter my bank account to make the payment! The sum was not debited to my debit card!
Nordea Bank has currently three methods to log in. The first is the old tried and tested method of using a paper code card (which has been in use from 1991), the second is fingerprint login, and the third is something known as Nordea Codes which requires one to carry around a plastic gadget called a Code Generator. Danske Bank has also such a gadget.
Can you imagine anything so retrograde as carrying around half a dozen such plastic gadgets on your key ring to log into banks!
Certainly not an innovative development from any Finnish Bank. I could devise for them a dozen methods much better than this Code Generator. But, here I am that I must think of carrying a Code Generator for my banks when packing my bag to take to the hospital before major surgery!
I use the old paper code card on my computer and fingerprint identification on my iPhone to do my Nordea banking. I have not activated my Nordea Code Generator device till date as it is too backward to even think of using it.
But here was foodie.fi not offering any of the other two methods of logging in into Nordea Bank except the Code Generator!
So I decided I would use another bank to make the payment.
My wife and I use our S-Pankki joint account mainly receive the bonus payments earned by shopping is SOK Corporation assspcatedvorgsnisatioms such as buying petrol. My wife also uses it to identify herself for any identification process, as access to medical records and other websites which need such a step. She is the main account holder in S-Pankki. We do not keep much money in the account.
It takes a day to transfer money from our Nordea Bank account to the S-Pankki account, so I transferred the required funds for my online shopping so that it would be available the next day.
Early Tuesday morning, after verifying that the funds were available in S-Pankki, from my hospital bed I went into foodie.fi to complete the transaction.
Lo and behold, when it came to paying the amount from my S-Pankki account, three times after logging in and putting in all the correct passwords from my S-Pankki login card, I was greeted by an error message which did not allow the transaction to be completed. Three times I was confronted by the same error telling me to try yet again!
I decided that next step would be to contact S-Pankki through their online CHAT facility. Since the matter was too complex to explain it in my limited foreigner’s Finnish, I sent the Chat message in English. I promptly got a reply from the Chat responder saying his English was not good enough and giving me the Customer Service phone number of S-Pankki.
I rang S-Pankki at 09:15 on Tuesday morning and explained the issue to the lady, also telling her how critical it was as I was stuck in a hospital bed and my wife was running out of food. She said that as her Finnish was not good enough she would ask someone to ring me back as soon as possible to resolve the issue!
At 11:15 I again rang to S-Pankki Customer Service and explained the matter was rather critical. The lady said that the person who spoke good English had been tied up and would call me back as soon as possible.
At 16:15, as there had been no call back, I rang again to S-Pankki but they said they had no one available to call me but would I ring foodie.fi to resolve the issue!
So I called foodie.fi. The minute I mentioned Sokos Herkku Oulu, they told me to call them to sort out the matter!
So I called Sokos Herkku Oulu. The lady handling Customer Service was also handling the bakery, so besides serving patonkis to customers, she listened to my story.
Obviously she was not experienced in these matters so she said she would talk to her boss and call me back.
She called me back after half an hour and said her boss did not know how to handle this and advised me to again contact foodie.fi.
I did this and I was cut off quickly advising me to call webinar foodie.fi Oulu. They gave me the phone number. When I dialled that number I was back chatting to the hard-working bakery lady in Sokos Herkku Oulu.
It was obvious we were getting nowhere, and as it was near 19:00 hours, we decided to end the matter there. I had to take some serious painkillers which would soon put me to sleep!
I was planning an alternate strategy to look after the problem. On Wednesday morning at just before 10 am, I got a call from S-Pankki. I told the lady that I had stopped wasting my time barking up a tree with no fruit on it, and told her to tell her IT team to solve their issues. I was not going to waste my time solving their companies problems.
What was obvious from this incident was that the software “solutions” offered by foodie.fi, Sokos Herkku Oulu, Nordea Bank and S-Pankki are all seriously defective. They would all need a revision from ground zero.
Further, it is obvious that the Customer Service of foodie.fi and S-Pankki need to retrain their personnel in how they deal with their customers.
In addition, the boss at Sokos Herkku Oulu, who threw up his hands and asked the lady in charge of the bakery to resolve a serious customer issue, needs to go for basic retraining on how to handle complaints.
This incident shows clearly that Finland is nowhere near the top in innovation. The banking software in Finland is obsolete, online service apps are way below anything prevailing even in third world countries, and there is a huge void in something known as customer service!
My advice to the banks is to get some people who know banking to redesign their internet banking service.
My advice to any retailer planning to do online food delivery is to stop using incompetent organisations as foodie.fi who have no idea what they are doing. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!
My advice to Sokos Herkku Oulu is to bring in competent managers who are trained in customer service.
And my advice io S-Pankki is probably to shut down their banking operations until they can provide a workable service to all their customers.
In short, this experience shows that Finland is not the Innovative country it claims to be!
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