How do you make a customer happy?

[funkymatt]

Originally posted by: byronm

Originally posted by: waggy

Originally posted by: byronm

Originally posted by: waggy
actually glad you posted it. now i sure know what company to avoid.

talk about bad communication. sounds like you need more work on running a business.

I would be happy to post the real emails here.

What is bad about what you see on RR anyways? thats what i'm asking for here

you would be willing to post the emails? go ahead.

Out of respect for myself and my former customer i would never actually post the emails.

I'm quite amazed the he posted my personal responses to RR as well as that is a violation of their terms of service.

Basically to sum up.

Order Placed, Notofication of Back order - few days - 40 emails go back and fourth about this order and other items he wants. He buys cpu locally, cancels order - signs up for inventory notification, receives notification of stocks, few days layer emails sales asking if he could do business again - we didn't respond yet - sales team had no clue who he was since his order/account had already been deleted per his request and we get tons of emails that appear legit but are fraud so i try and manually review these when i can to see if there is anything real out there.

2 days pass, i see the review on RR, surprised i ask him to revise it since i felt it was unfair he was reviewing an order that never happened and that he had canceled and that i could do business with him again (since it wasn't really sour at this point) - told him to email me personally. Respond to his email and agree and the best thing for him to do would be to have his friend receive it and mail it out if he wanted to get my current shipment without waiting for me to process the exports.

Emails exchange, they get bitter - the RR review is updated and he posts contents of our emails (that still ignore the truth of the matter) and i let it get to me and i go back and review my response and just spell out the truth. Mind you no email actually went beyond 48 hours to respond to unless it was the weekend.

Its probably a chain of 45 emails before the deal went sour, all responded to quickly.


If someone is good at framing the debate (especialy with the mantra the customer is always right) does that mean that i'm still wrong? all of the good we did is excluded and only his disappointing half of a story for an order that never happened is his full review.

so he never even completed an order from you guys?

 

[byronm]

so he never even completed an order from you guys?

no. The review is about an order that was never even placed.

 

[dabuddha]

Originally posted by: waggy
good ot see you will not post the emails. thats a big mistake if you did.


you both blew it. good learning tool though. you should never ask a review such as this to change it. should have ignored it from the start.

BUT he is not the only one not satasifed. seems you guys need to improve how invetory works. you seem to be having it as instock when people want it and they have to wait for it.


not to mention getting a rep as someone who has t hem at one price then higher latter..

Agreed.

You didn't really answer this reviewer's "question":

4/5/08 4:33 PM
Moogr.com was running a big sale on AMD processors, had banner ads all over their site. After my order was placed online I received a confirmation email saying that my order was accepted. The next day I received an email that it was canceled due to a lack of inventory to fill the order. However, their website still shows almost 200 units in stock and is still accepting orders - but now at three times the price! My order status page even claims that I never placed an order with the site.

A representative from Moogr.com stated that the orders were canceled because they sold out of inventory - but their website was still accepting orders and showed the item in stock! Then the rep said that customers who placed their orders early got their orders filled - but my order was canceled even though it was placed 2 hours before another customer order that was accepted!

I'm keeping a close eye on my credit card activity because now there is a company with questionable practices that has my CC#, expiration date, and CVV3 # as well.

I'd suggest that potential customers steer clear of this vendor until they change their doublespeak ways.

Order Date 4/3/08
Reseller Reply

Posted by
4/6/08 9:14 AM
Dear Customer

You received an automated message that the quantity of cpus you ordered (20) was not available. Its a standard "OFS" email we send out when we can't fulfill any order.

Your credit card was never billed and your order was canceled.

I will be calling you to discuss this further as I consider such harsh reviews seriously

He said you guys cancelled his order because of lack of inventory but your website still showed over 200 in stock at a much higher price.

What gives?

 

[alkemyst]

well most will not leave feedback unless they had a bad experience...that sucks usually as in the beginning your bad can outway your good.

Also although support is important, it's thankless as people expect to be able to call and have the phone answered.

Also in today's market people are constantly shopping today...ordering and then continue to shop figuring they will just cancel the order and chargeback if they find it cheaper.

It sucks...esp when it's 30days later and like most things prices have gone down.

For a larger retailer they can do this, for a smaller retailer that price adjustment may be the profit on the last 10 orders.

 

[byronm]

Originally posted by: waggy


not to mention getting a rep as someone who has t hem at one price then higher latter..

Unfortunately Thats inevitable when you source from multiple places.

What happened is distributor "A" gave me rebates - prices were reflected on the website. Deal was posted to Slck deals by someone - received dozens of orders - even one person ordering 500 cpus.

Automated Inventory update -> Orders marked as out of stock/un available because distributor "B"s pricing is 40+ dollars more.

I processed about 30 orders taking a 60.00 loss per order. We took about 5k in losses that day to close out what we could because of the variance.

What i learned is that we may create a unique sku for future deals so they run out but we still have the problem that we don't actually reduce inventory until the order is fulfilled and inventory is only updated online every 4-6 hours anyway and may reflect sources that we pull from just as fulfillment but at a drastically different price.

I'm all ears as to how to help solve this or make it easier to explain to people. Our system was designed to just flag it as out of stock and that was an automatic process.

Again, in this case no money was exchanged, no card charged nor authorized and we communicated quickly. Just turns out that people thought we were "phishing" for credit card numbers and everyone who didn't get processed was upset so it was a bit of a balancing act to resolve.

growing pains i geuss and thats why i'm here asking for the "non technical" way to resolve issues that customers don't really care about but want an answer for. They don't care about my fulfillment ways and pricing disparity that can cause this but they do get upset when they see something they feel that doesn't make sense and then post about that on SD and others chime in claiming we're a fraud and whatnot.

hard business to be in, thats for sure.

 

[alkemyst]

Originally posted by: dabuddha

He said you guys cancelled his order because of lack of inventory but your website still showed over 200 in stock at a much higher price.

What gives?

Hopefully he isn't one of those companies that really do nothing but source and drop ship from others.

I had this issue with a header recently. They always knew if I ordered they could get one...they didn't expect the manufacturer to stop production for the next few months during a reorg.

 

[Mr Pickles]

Try giving them all BJs? It always helps my vendors when they want me to renew contracts.

 

[byronm]

He said you guys cancelled his order because of lack of inventory but your website still showed over 200 in stock at a much higher price.

What gives?

Read my info below. We source from different warehouses and from this issue just learned to create a unique limited sku so our system wouldn't send out an automated out of stock email in such cases.

It basically worked like this - to spell it out even further.

* We load up every warehouse, dropshipper, Fulfillment, Manufacturer we do business with
* Pricing is a formula based upon EACH INDIVIDUAL "fulfillment center" - which vary in pricing - sometimes greatly

* Price is reflected on website according to best value - inventory is reflected as a "whole". Dropshipper A may only have 50 unites while B could be 1000 and C could be 50 and D could be 3 and E could be 23 so on so forth (again, all at different prices)


* Distributor (a) sells out at listed retail price
* Distributor B's price is drastically different - OFA - out of stock goes out - distributor A is discontinuing the product and will not get anymore at the stated price. (automated email)

We processed some orders manually and take a loss to ship from Distributor B when available. Wanted to make some people happy.


We have automatic pricing whenever possible so we can offer the best value according to the daily pricing we get on items that we don't buy in bulk specifically. This way as our distributors drop prices - we can to - and immediately.

just hard to logically provide a system that doesn't generically consume and report an issue such as being out of stock - which is true to a degree but in stock at a different price. I'll probably just send out "pricing issue" emails in the future and accept the poor reviews i'll get from that instead.

 

[waggy]

Originally posted by: alkemyst

Originally posted by: dabuddha

He said you guys cancelled his order because of lack of inventory but your website still showed over 200 in stock at a much higher price.

What gives?

Hopefully he isn't one of those companies that really do nothing but source and drop ship from others.

I had this issue with a header recently. They always knew if I ordered they could get one...they didn't expect the manufacturer to stop production for the next few months during a reorg.

thats what it sounds like.

 

[byronm]

Originally posted by: alkemyst

Originally posted by: dabuddha

He said you guys cancelled his order because of lack of inventory but your website still showed over 200 in stock at a much higher price.

What gives?

Hopefully he isn't one of those companies that really do nothing but source and drop ship from others.

I had this issue with a header recently. They always knew if I ordered they could get one...they didn't expect the manufacturer to stop production for the next few months during a reorg.

We do everything we can to get products out. We inventory some, drop ship others and use fulfillment whenever possible.

Technology fulfillment as a whole is moving from a distribution -> warehouse -> customer more towards distribution -> customer or manufacturer -> customer because the cost of middle man inventory movement is exceeding the margin/markups on products - especially as fuel prices increase.

if i had millions of dollars to invest in larger bulk i would. I don't hide the fact were a ma' pa' shop

 

[byronm]

Originally posted by: waggy

Originally posted by: alkemyst

Originally posted by: dabuddha

He said you guys cancelled his order because of lack of inventory but your website still showed over 200 in stock at a much higher price.

What gives?

Hopefully he isn't one of those companies that really do nothing but source and drop ship from others.

I had this issue with a header recently. They always knew if I ordered they could get one...they didn't expect the manufacturer to stop production for the next few months during a reorg.

thats what it sounds like.

We do inventory some stuff and hope to open up a "Will call" pickup here in Lancaster PA. There is local demand for what the local circuit city and pc retailers don't offer. I get emails about it all day, just can't afford the human resources to support it right now.

 

[byronm]

you both blew it. good learning tool though. you should never ask a review such as this to change it. should have ignored it from the start.

Live and learn. I don't think there was any real answer to this particular predicament. The review started because we chose to ignore his further emails. Instead of asking him to edit a review for an order that never happened i guess i should have reported it and waiting 2-3 weeks for RR to drop it.

Thats what i'll do in the future.. just thought communicating with the customer would have solved it better.

Mistake noted.

 

[arameth]

Byronm,

Just the fact that you are seeking feedback from these forums shows that you actually do care about your customers. That, IMHO, puts you heads and shoulders above many of the outfits doing business out there.

I think it comes down to this: If you and your employees make an honest "best effort" to satisfy your customers, then that should be good enough so that you don't lose sleep at night. Sure, mistakes get made. Sure, people get angry. And sure, some people will never be satisfied no matter what you do. The highest standard you can live up to is your own.

One thing I believe highly in is prompt communication...even if the communication being made is to convey bad or disappointing news. Also, I would recommend concentrating more on hiring a qualified person to handle email inquiries. A good email customer service rep can sometimes handle twice the volume of customer contacts as compared to a phone rep, and they can do this off hours as well. That, and using email establishes a written history, which can come in handy if the customer has a problem "recollecting" the details of a transaction. In short, use technology to your advantage whenever possible, but it's also nice to be able to reach someone on the phone if something is just too complicated to hash out over email.

As for the sourcing/pricing problem you mentioned, going with a unique SKU is definitely a good idea to help avoid pricing/inventory mistakes like you mentioned. It may also help separate your cost/profit on items that have a variable price. But be careful that you don't end up with too many SKU's...unless you have a system setup to manage this easily. On the flip side of this argument, your customers may not really care about your business model...all they know is that they placed an order for a specific item at a specific price and expect it to be fulfilled.

With that being said, I wish you luck. It is difficult to own your own business, and having owned my own before, I am familiar with the challenges involved.

By the way, can you PM/email me about my order?