Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:07 pm
This blog post has been inspired by a friend who rescues animals and gives them a “for-ever” home. The time came when her “pet room” needed to be re-organised as the number of cages had exceeded the space available.
Having spent time looking around on the net and saving money she placed an order for 5 double cages (the equivalent of 10 cages – yes, she has that many pets) and was told that the items were on back order and should be delivered to her on the 26th March, about 3 weeks after the cages were ordered. She accepted this date, handed over more than £1,000 to get the cages and started to plan the layout of the room with the new cages.
Imagine her disappointment when the 26th came and went and she got an email saying that the cages would now be with her on the 13th April due to “the manufacturers not delivering the cages yet”. Once again the 13th came and went and a new delivery date of the 16th was confirmed. On the 17th she phoned up to see where the cages were to be told that they had been delayed coming in “yet again” and had only arrived that morning and they would be delivered “tomorrow or the day after”. They finally turned up just after 5pm in the 19th (the day after) much to her relief, and just before she was going to contact the credit card company and ask if she could dispute the charge as the goods had failed to arrive.
As you can imagine when the cages were first ordered she was excited and told all of her family and friends about the cages and told people about the site that she found them on. Because of the way that the process went on the comments left on Facebook and made to friends took on more and more of a disappointed tone which can then lead to poor customer testimonials (not something that any business wants) – see our page on why testimonials work for reasons why you want good testimonials.
If you think about this story you can see that with a little bit of pro-active handling by the company involved and managing her expectations a little better, the comments, upset and risk of bad publicity would have been greatly reduced.
If you run you a business that deals with customers ordering items ask yourself this question – is it better to promise something will be done by the following Monday and then not be able to deliver it until the Wednesday or would it be better to promise that it will be done by Friday and then contact them to say that it’s coming in early?
I’d love to know what you think about this and how you manage your customer expectations, just leave a comment in the form below.