Last week a customer ordered 6 bottles of non-alcoholic sparkling juice for use on Sunday at the final of their football season. Despite our best efforts, our couriers twice let us down and it looked like they weren’t going to get their juice in time. There was only one thing for it… a trip down the M6 on Sunday morning!
We always stress to customers that even though most orders are shipped the same day the order is placed, and most of those orders are received the following day, if you need something for an imporant event on a particular day, don’t wait until the day before to order it.
In this particular case the customer did order in plenty of time but things still managed to go wrong.
Whilst delivery problems are rare, it’s always best to order as early as possible because it at least gives us time to fix any problems that might occur. If you order the day before then all it takes is the delivery van to break down and your event is ruined.
To start the debacle off, our couriers managed to lose the customer’s order. It doesn’t happen often, but when you ship at lot of parcels it’s inevitable that the odd one will go missing in the system. Sometimes they are found the next day and delivered, but sometimes they are never found and we have to send out a replacement. That’s exactly what we did in this case. We sent out a replacement on Friday for special delivery on Saturday morning.
Would you believe it, our couriers managed to let us down again. Having lost the first one, they then failed to deliver the replacement on Saturday morning. At this stage, you can imagine just how embarrased we felt. We had promised the customer they would have their order twice now and twice we were let down by our couriers. It would have been bad enough had this been an existing customer who knew how good our service normally was, but it was a new customer and we all know how important first impressions are.
I can’t pretend we do this for every problematic delivery (although it’s certainly not the first time we’ve done it) but we decided we couldn’t let their event be spoiled so we got up early Sunday morning and drove down to Birmingham from Manchester with their 6 bottles of juice in the boot. They had to get it before 12 and we got there with plenty of time to spare.
We received a lovely email from them on the Tuesday thanking us for bringing the replacement down. They told us the football team (juniors) loved the juice, that they were really impressed with our service and that they would be ordering again in June for their awards evening. Hopefully this time our couriers (whoever they may be then…) will get it right first time and we won’t need another trip down to Birmingham!
That said, we decided to make a day of it and spent a lovely afternoon there and had a really nice day out. I’ve not been to Birmingham for about 10 years – it was Chris’s first visit – and they have certainly done a lot to the city in recent years. The canal area at Brindley Place was particularly nice. I think we’ll go back soon and spend a weekend there although hopefully not because he have to make a delivery!
