{"id":38521,"date":"2013-05-27T07:07:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T05:07:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=38521"},"modified":"2013-05-27T08:49:26","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T06:49:26","slug":"we-messed-up-groupon-sa-ceo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/internet\/38521\/we-messed-up-groupon-sa-ceo\/","title":{"rendered":"We messed up: Groupon SA CEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wayne Gosling<\/a>, CEO of daily deals site Groupon<\/a> SA, says that the company has let its customers down in recent times in terms of its product delivery and general customer service.<\/p>\n

Groupon has come under harsh criticism on consumer champion website HelloPeter in the last 12 months. Out of 3,784 reports on the site about Groupon SA, 3,300 have been negative with complaints ranging from goods not being received, no refunds, to incorrect product delivery, and poor after-sales service.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have had huge mess-ups in terms of our products and delivery, which has been well documented,\u201d Gosling said, adding that as the company added to its daily deals quota, \u201cwe were handling stuff, but not as dynamically as we could be\u201d.<\/p>\n

This, according to Gosling, is largely the reason for the appointment earlier this week of a new head of customer services, Katja Alves<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Groupon SA said that Alves has been appointed to roll out new international processes and procedures to align the Cape-Town based call centre with Groupon International\u2019s standards.<\/p>\n

\"Wayne<\/a>

Wayne Gosling and Daniel Guasco<\/p><\/div>\n

Gosling says that Groupon SA has bolstered its call-centre staff, based in Cape Town, to 39 people out of a total group quotient of 130 people.<\/p>\n

He said that Groupon SA handles approximately 600-700 deals on its site at any given time and is now operational in five cities. \u201cThe model hasn\u2019t stopped growing in South Africa, it\u2019s one of the more profitable ones in the world\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Earlier this month, Groupon, which is active in 48 countries, reported encouraging quarterly results with operating income up\u00a0$34.0 million\u00a0compared with fourth quarter in 2012. Analysts have expressed concern over the group’s ability to scale.<\/p>\n

Active customers, or customers who purchased a\u00a0Groupon\u00a0within the last twelve months, grew 13% year-over-year, to 41.7 million as of\u00a0March 31, 2013, comprising 18.2 million in\u00a0North America, and 23.5 million in International markets.<\/p>\n

These numbers impressed investors, and boosted its share price to $7.26 on the Nasdaq, but still someway off its November 2011 initial public offering price\u00a0of $20 a\u00a0share.<\/p>\n

Alves joined Groupon from customer contact solutions firm Merchants, a Dimension Data company.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the key accounts I worked on for the last 4 years was ASDA, a major UK High Street retailer, who have their call centre based here in South Africa. This retailer has high expectations regarding the level of service they demand for their customers: and use a quality framework to ensure consistent responses across all written and verbal contact with their customers, so that the experience exceeds the caller\u2019s expectations.”<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is that consistency of excellence I am looking to foster and continue to drive here at Groupon in co-operation with the international push to standardise our processes and consumer expectations,\u201d Alves said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the last 3 months we have seen a steady rise in our customer satisfaction scores, so this will hopefully give that trend a solid boost. We are looking forward to seeing the implementation of several new processes that Katja wishes to drive, coupled with the technology support roll-out to ensure we have clear oversight of our call centre at all times,\u201d Gosling said.<\/p>\n

More on Groupon<\/h3>\n

Things look up for Groupon<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Groupon SA complaints flood in<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Groupon exposes customer emails<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Is Groupon dying?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Groupon SA CEO, Wayne Gosling, says that the company has let its customers down in recent times in terms of its product delivery and general customer service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9882],"tags":[153,5915,26,5916,5914],"class_list":["post-38521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-groupon","tag-groupon-sa","tag-headline","tag-katja-alves","tag-wayne-gosling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38521"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38684,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38521\/revisions\/38684"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}