Hallo!
Overall we did write five mails in direkt respod to your mails.
The first mail was send to you one day after your initial order. This confirmed the additional order of the "klapphocker".
At the same day you wrote a mail with a link to an competitor, asking for the same price. If so you wanted to order. Sorry, but for this question, we did not answer.
But at the next step we really did an mistake an did not realize early enough that the blancet will have an unexpected delay. But we did answer your question according to your order. But unfortunately again late.
At this time we also informed you about the unecpected delay of the shipment the estimatet deliverytime to you. You complained that we did not answer your question if we match the competior and cancelled the order. We confirmed your cancellation and send the money back.
So the conclusion to me is that we really did mastakes here.
1. we did realize to late that we will not be able to keep the announced deliverytime. Sorry, we will improve this.
2. We do not answer questions if we match this or that price. We offer good prices, extreemly competitive. But we can´t match a sale action of other shops with our normal products. Not answering this questions reduces workload but is unpolite. So we will change this.
3. We have not been able to keep the deliverytime and did a poor communication (slow) to this. So we did mistakes and I want to appologize for this.
But even this is far away from what you wrote: "Did not reply..." Until you wrote this complain here, we wrote four mails to you to answer your questions!
So if five mails means "all dead" for you, sorry. We will take care also for this complain, even if it is rare one, to improve and avoid this for the future.
Overalll we deliver aboud 90% of the shipments in time. But some rare we mess up like this one. We did changes and a individually software that will help us keeping track of the reare delayed products and as well for the customer contact in case of delay.
I did send a long mail to the customer with an additional excuse, and explanation as well as the steps we took to solve the problem. Finally I invited him to check if the improvements work propperly and as expected. To this mail I did not get an answer yet.
Here is a part of this mail:
Good morning!
first I want to excuse for the mistakes we made. So we really did a bad job on your order, and the key message of your posting is true.
You are right, we did send you obviously only two individual mails until you cancelled the order. Unfortunately I got an wrong information and also did later mix up an contact with a person also called like you (conversation to my empoyee at the same time – and your name is very reare here). So I DID NOT lie when I wrote you – but it was wrong.
Also your mail to me and the one of the ombutsman did not reach me. Thank you for your detailed feedback, so I took it as a chance for a deep review. Internally I changed some things now – more you will find later in this mail.
You are right, we are a small company. Nearly no sales at the beginning of corona. But still healthy. Then, fortunately a “run” started and made it possible to get into an good positive direction. So we went from “Kurzarbeit” directly to “overload” in connection with working in two teams, homeoffice…
At the same time the suppliers had problems to deliver in time – or even tell delays. We covered this by selling only from stock for a while. After some weeks, the supply process stabilized substantially. So we started again with selling products which we order prompt at the supplier. We are connected to some suppliers stock with an daily update. So we only offer what is said to be in stock there. But after order we did not get an Info from the specific supplier that the blanced will be delayed. They also seem to struggle. But with the adjustred deliverytimes which we announce in the shop, we again are able to deliver 90% in the promised time. Which also means 10% has an delay. Overall this is ok.
But still, it is up to us to realize the delay and to act and inform the customer. We use a strong and widespread software – but it is not able to remind us when shipments get into delay.
So this is the situation.
Why didn´t we change this before? I founded the company 15 years ago. 8 years ago I sold it due to personal reasons, mainly to have time for my kids and myself. This spring the company came back to me. Inbetween they did a good job, but also there is room for improvements.
And I started to do one by one. And then corona came – with the impacts as described.
End of may, when the run started, it became obvious, that we are not able to track the delays (also because the dalays by the suppliers became unpredictable due to several reasons). So we started to develop a plugin to the shop which will inform us for every single order which is in danger to be delayed – and then keep track and be in contact with the customer. It will be ready 5th July 2020. I also increased stock as much as possible to deliver from our stock if possible. We allready have an really unusual big stock by our self - about 70% of all orders we ship is directly from our stock.
Additionally I introduced an mailadress for mails which we did not answer within an workingday. This mails will reach me directly. So a situation like yours should not be possible any more, because
1. We will be much better in tracking the orders in case of delay
2. All requests to delayed or missing answers for mails will come to me directly. No way that I do not get aware of the problem.
Last but not least, I try to balance the workload. Which is pretty hard. Nobaody knows what will happen next. A second shutdown? So it is hard to hire new employees – because I feel responsible, not hire and fire. Some employees I hired 10 years ago. Also the person in charge for your mails. She is doing a great job. But due to to high workload she did mistakes. And I did the mistake not to be aware enough of the overload.
So I think we used the problems to improve our structure. In this regard also thank you for your detailed reply – it was inconvenient, but very helpful.
I reported your posting on trustpilot because of the clearnames you used. Please understand that I have to protect the privacy of my employees. As long as it is in review, I can´t answer there.
I hope we find a better way to communicate there then “you did this, and you did that”. Also “all dead”, “lying”… is maybe not the way it should be - simply because it is not true.
Also, if you write an mail at the end of bureau time and an identical one at the next morning – I think, if we answer around noon, this is pretty ok and does not mean that we did not answer the mail at the evening.
This is why I say we need one workingday to answer (which also means that we answer on Monday for mails coming in from Friday afternoon on). Normally we cope with that, even if it might be hard to believe for you in an situation like this.
But for the really bad cases like this here, we now have the new direct mail to me. It will be placed on the shop contact site today.
I also learned my part in answering a bad review… could do it better.
My answer to your posting will be an extract of this mail.
Maybe you give a second chance to us.
Or maybe you might be interested in helping to improve our service by giving direct feedback to me when we introduce the delay tracking software (maybe by producing a delay by purpose on an test order).