Follow On TwitterRunning Our Online Store: Highlights And Lowlights Of The Week
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Lately, I’ve getting a bunch of emails asking me how much time my wife and I actually spend running the store and what our day to day operations are like. All I can really say is that every week is completely different. While on the surface you would think that all we do is pack and ship orders, there is a good amount of customer interaction and other activities that occur behind the scenes.
Photo by Alaskan Dude
As with everything in life, running our store has its share of ups and downs. And while the downs inevitably suck, the variability and unpredictable aspects of running the business are things that I really enjoy. In the interests of trying something different with this blog, I thought I’d occasionally devote a post or so to discuss the highs and lows of running our business. This past week definitely had a combination of both.
Lowlight Of The Week
Sometimes owning a store just isn’t fair. While you can do everything in your power to steer the outcome, there are just some things that are beyond your control.
For example, one thing that you have no control over is your shipping carrier. While you can make sure your items are shipped out on time, once the package is out of your hands, you have to rely on your carrier to deliver the order properly.
The other thing you have no control over is your end customer and how he/she will react to your products and services. This week we had a customer complain to us that her express package was not delivered at all even though she paid extra money to have her order overnighted.
The funny thing is that she waited a full week to contact us after we had already made the shipment. Checking the tracking information online, the website indicated that 3 delivery attempts were made and that the package was in transit back to us.
With all express deliveries we always require a signature to make sure the end customer receives their order. This particular customer claimed to have never received any of the notices and that she needed her order ASAP for an upcoming wedding.
In reality, she should have contacted us long ago but for some inexplicable reason waited an entire week despite paying for next day delivery. What could we do? In the back of my mind, I was debating whether to just have this customer take it up with the post office directly. The other thing I was considering was to charge this customer for express shipping again to have her order reshipped. However both of these solutions probably would have just created one pissed off customer.
Because it was unclear who was at fault, we ended up shipping her another package and eating the extra shipping costs. One thing was certain, it was definitely not our fault! To make matters worse, her order was composed of personalized items that we would never be able to resell again so we had to eat the cost of the product as well. ACK!
Highlight Of The Week
One of the joys of being in the wedding industry is that you get to deal with excited brides and their families. One of the customer calls we received this week really made our day.
The one particular lady was a proud mother of a bride to be and spent a good 5 minutes gushing about how she saw our hankies at another wedding she attended and how lovely they were. Her enthusiasm was so genuine and so infectious that it made my wife and I feel good all over about our store and our products.
Even today, I find it hard to fathom how something as simple as a personalized handkerchief can bring so much joy to someone at their wedding. And the fact that we sell such sentimental products and produce such happy customers really brings a smile to my face.
On a completely different note, what also makes me smile is seeing our store and profits soar. Even though there’s still a week left in the month, we are on track to beat our last years numbers for the month by 68%!
So what do you think? Did you find these highlights and lowlights interesting? Would you have handled that customer situation differently?
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Steve, I think your response was exactly the right one. Your delivery service may or may not have knocked on the door / rang the bell, so even if the customer was at home waiting for the delivery, she may never have known the carrier was right outside her door.
I’ve also had ‘signature required’ packages just dumped on the porch. If the neighborhood is crime-ridden, that could result in the contents being stolen before the customer goes outside. Once I sent a package to my nephew. The package was delivered to the wrong apartment. It took almost a week to find out who had it.
This doesn’t change the fact that some people may try to misuse your positive customer service to rip you off. Maybe you should tell us (in general outlines) about some of your experiences in that area, too.
– W^L+ (@lnxwalt on Twitter/Jaiku/Identi.Ca)
@W^L
The strange thing is that this has happened more than once in just this month alone. What’s odd is that usually a notice is left in the mail or at the door. The carrier claimed that 3 notices were left and the customer received none of them. In any case, our general philosophy is that the customer shouldn’t have to worry about how their order arrives. The package should just arrive and that’s that. This doesn’t happen too often so eating the occasional cost isn’t a big deal. I’m not sure if any of our customers have deliberately abused our customer service. In general, I think our clientele is more concerned about our products arriving at their wedding in time rather than trying to cheat us.
I commend you Steve, not just for choosing the best option for the customer but just for being in the wedding business at all! I would /never/ enter that market after seeing some of the Bridezillas I’ve seen. If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s an episode of Cake Boss where he makes a wedding cake and the night before it’s due the Bride drops in and says she hates it, he says there’s nothing he can do and when he steps out of the room she destroys the cake by smearing various colored icing all over it. He handled it amazingly (and stayed up all night making another cake) but I would probably have killed her. You’re a bigger man than I and I wish you the best in keeping a cool top with your customers.
@Jace
I think that I would have lost my cool with the bridezilla that you just described. In general, all of our customers are nice and polite even when they have a complaint. And I always tend to treat polite customers much better than rude ones. Heck in most cases, I’ll go out of my way to help the customers that keep their cool. Hope I never get a bridezilla. Not entirely sure how I would react. Most likely, I’ll hand the phone to my wife:)