Pizza Hut delivery - more than just a moped and spotty teenager delivery boy

Pizza delivered to your door is as low effort as you can realistically put into a meal. Historically this has meant phoning up your local outlet reading through a leaflet shoved through your door, paying the delivery lad when they rock up and chomping down on your Hawaiian deep pan. Pizza Hut (www.pizzahut.co.uk) have been working on digitising this experience with mobile optimised web pages and PayPal mobile payment options. You can work through your choices from your smart phone and pay without having to worry about scrabbling about for loose change. This makes a low effort dinner even lower effort. Epic. 

Email address harvesting by companies as part of returns policy

Companies use a returned product as a good opportunity to gather valuable customer data in the process of authenticating the return seeking to weed out fraud. Historically this would entail providing a name and address but in a digital age this has now extended to include email address. Rather blatantly companies are using this harvesting of email details to immediately add you to their mailing list and then sell on your details to associated companies. Unlike most forms of personal data collection there is no box to opt out of this and you are by default then subject to this and the corresponding flood of promotional emails that follow from the offending company and any related organisations. This process can happen fast as well with your personal details swilling a around within 24 hours the customer database of all many of suppliers. There is little you can do other than to unsubscribe from each of the email intrusions retaining control of your inbox. Not a very customer centric experience and far from epic 

The virgin experience days customer journey

Experience day gifts have been with us for years offering a good solution for the person who has everything and impossible to buy for.  Virgin experience days is one of the market leaders in this field (http://www.virginexperiencedays.co.uk) offering hundreds of different packages starting from as little as the price of a decent meal. At the other end of the scale you could stay at Richard Brandon's own Necker Island for 7 nights for £17,000. But what about the customer journey?  How does someone negotiate through this buying process where the gift recipient is already identified as a difficult bugger to buy for? With some difficulty is the answer due to the vast range on over. With experiences from £9 to £17,000 and everything in between there are 1,000's of alternatives and it is easy to get lost in the wealth of choice. Yes on the web site they offer excellent search and filter utilities but with such a depth and breadth of things to do it becomes too much and the gift buyer gives up and goes for the easy option of a voucher. Passing the buck onto the lucky recipient who then has the issue of trawling through the 1,000's of alternatives for themselves. How many of these vouchers expire I wonder as people can't face the scale of searching for a favoured choice. Lots of choice but epic scale of numbers doesn't lead to an epic experience.