Valentines day. A day most women expect flowers from their husbands and boy friends. Some men procrastinate and wait until the last minute. Others like me don’t. I ordered flowers and candy from @1800flowers more than a week before Valentines day. I know that V-day is an extremely busy day for flower delivery. You would think ordering a week before and ordering with a company like 1800Flowers would be a safe bet. That thought would be wrong!
My wife did not get her flowers on V-day and as of now 9 am the day after V-day, they still had not arrived.
I woke up to the following email:
Hi,
As you can imagine, our florists are out delivering Valentine’s flowers and smiles across the nation. They’ll be doing so all day and night and your delivery may have already arrived or is on its way. Because our florists are so busy making deliveries, we may not be able to offer you a delivery confirmation or status update on your gift until later today or possibly tomorrow.
As soon as we hear your delivery’s on its way or has arrived, we’ll be sure to let you know.
You can always receive the most up to date information on your order by tracking it here: Order Tracking
Thanks for your patience and understanding — and as always, thanks for trusting us to deliver smiles for you.
Bibi Brown
Director of Customer Experience
Bibi, really! You think this is a satisfactory email to send out to people! You think this will please customers like me who are pissed off that their orders were not delivered on the day they’re suppose to be delivered. An email like this is nothing but a really lame attempt at getting customers off your back. I’d rather it say “our service sucks, but there’s nothing we can really do about it”. At least that would be honest.
After reading this email, along with having 2 of my last 3 orders with 1800Flowers have some type of problem, I thought to myself… “that’s it with 1800Flowers. They’ve lost me as a customer”. I decided to cancel my order and attempt to get a full refund. First try was the phone. After going through the phone options, I get some type of automated message saying they’re too busy to answer more calls. 2nd phone attempt was picking a phone option as if I wanted to change my order. This got me through to a holding queue. Meanwhile I head over to @1800flowers on Twitter. Sure enough, there were hundreads of tweets being made all dealing with problems like mine.
I waited on hold for 30 minutes, while I was tweeting out complaints to @1800flowers. After 30 minutes, I got someone in customer service who I told about the non-delivery and supposedly got a full refund with the order being cancelled. It will be interesting to see if the credit is actually placed back to my credit card.
So that’s how 1800Flowers lost me as a customer. And looking through a Twitter search for 1800flowers, I can see they’ll be thousand of other customers like me who will never be using them again.
If I could give one bit of advice to 1800Flowers it would simply be, stop taking orders when you reach a saturation point. By continuing to take orders beyond the level that you can fill them does more damage to your company than you can every imagine.
And Bibi, emails like the one you sent do nothing but enrage most people. In this day and time, it’s all about transparency. Be honest and send an email acknowledging that too many orders were taken and could not be successfully fulfilled. Apologize and let people know that you’ll be making changes so that it doesn’t happen again.
Even though an email like this won’t change my mind (I’m still never using 1800Flowers again), it may prevent people like me front ranting about it in a blog.
And as a side not about @1800Flowers on Twitter. Heather, on their Twitter account had sent me a tweet saying DM her with my information and she’ll try to help. It’s been almost an hour since I sent her a DM and as of now have not gotten a response. It’s will be interesting to see if I ever get one, or if they just send out tweets to look like they’re trying to help.
Hi, I'm Steve... an eCommerce merchant that writes about eCommerce, advertising, marketing, blogging, design, social media, seo, tech and other randomness.
This has been a disaster. I ordered flowers for my wife on Valentines Day and they never showed up.
I also received the same email message from Bibi, and it only made me more upset with them.
I tried to call their Customer Service this morning only to have an automated message tell me they are experiencing high call volumes and they can’t take my call, then the system hangs up on me.
So, I tweeted at them and told them how upset I was and that I want a refund. They also asked me to follow them and DM. I declined to do this, ’cause I few this as spam since they are asking everyone to do this. I also attached @spam to my tweet back to them.
I also posted a support request on their website, but who knows if that even goes anywhere.
If I don’t hear from them today, I will be looking at doing a charge back.
I Agree Graeme, huge disaster!
What’s most interesting is they think it’s acceptable to deliver v-day flowers the day after v-day. CRAZY!