In reply to Jimbob11:
Hi Jim,
I'm sorry to hear you have been having problems getting in touch with us, we have two dedicated lines at the shop but due to large volumes of calls it seems even these have been engaged of late.
We take customer service very seriously indeed and as such is at the top of our list. I have taken a look into your order and would like to take this opportunity to explain the process further. As you have kindly stated, we have contacted you since your original post but I thought a more detailed explanation of the processes involved would be helpful in light of other posts.
With standard delivery, which you chose for your goods, delivery time is generally 2-4 working days. There is no live tracking with this method. We always give an indication in your dispatch mail to how long the wait is likely to be for your item. Once we have dispatched the goods we have to rely on the customer to let us know if they do not receive them.
On checking the E-mails for both our accounts I could only find the one mail from you which arrived with us at 20.47 on the evening of Friday 14th. The following day, Saturday we spoke to you on the phone when you called. Unfortunately Royal Mail will not start looking into a claim until 15 working days have passed and with it being a weekend the original staff member was not present to see if any additional light could be shed on the issue. When the staff member returned on Monday we tried to call you on the telephone number that is held on your account but unfortunately, probably due to a typo when you were entering it, there was a digit missing. We always prefer to talk to our customers rather than E-mail as it is important to us that we give that personal level of care we believe they deserve. Monday is always an extremely busy day for us and I am sorry to say that we did not get around to E-mailing you back to inform you of the digit missing until 17.42.
Once we have dispatched the goods, we have to rely on a third party (Royal Mail in this case) to deliver them. At this point we can do no more until we hear that the goods have not arrived, even then we have to wait for the allotted period of time to pass before we can rectify anything as Royal Mail state that goods can still be delivered up to 14 working days after postage. This has actually been over 30 days in some cases but we are able to make a claim after 15. Having said all this we dealt with 1000's of orders over the Christmas period and to date less than 0.4% of them did not turn up and that was with the incredibly inclement weather that we suffered.
I hope this has shed some light on the processes that are involved in order dispatch and what we are doing about it. Mails can occasionally be deleted or routed to SPAM by our mail filters, as maybe the case with Jim, (please could you send us a copy of these if you still have them so I can check our folders) so it is always a good idea to phone or send another mail if you have not received a reply in 24hrs. Having said all this we are human and occasionally we will make mistakes but we do all we can to make them an extremely infrequent event. I would urge anyone who has a query or problem to ring or E-mail us, we will do everything we can to assist you. Unfortunately due to engaged telephones it seems we may have fallen short of the standards we have set ourselves in this case and I apologise for this, maybe there is a case for us to get a third line!
Thank you to Jim for his original query and to all those that contributed to this post, it is always good to get feedback. Granted the good is always more satisfying than the bad but the bad gives us an opportunity to put things right and learn from any mistakes we may have made. Without customers no retail outlet would be trading, it is why we endeavour to give the best customer service we can and why we will always try to do better.
Gareth Aston
& the team at V12
