Email ordering

One of the things we have noticed happening more and more, is people wanting to order flowers via email. While in principal we have no issue with this and will do all we can to accomodate customers that wish to place orders in this way, we do need to warn you that we don't always get round to picking our emails up on a daily basis.  Our online ordering system alerts us when an order has come through, and automatically prints the order out for us so that we can't miss it, but emails get checked, as and when we have time too. Some days they don't get checked at all where we have been too busy to log on.  The other thing with emails is that they don't always come through and end up lost in cyber space; the odd 1 or 2 also find themselves ending up in a spam folder, so they are a very shaky and un-advisable way of ordering if you are in a hurry as it means we may not be able to help with your order; there is a chance of the unthinkable happening  and the flowers not being able to be delivered at all.

Sadly that has happened this week and it's not something we like at all as we had to let a customer down because of it. Now the customer didn't send the email to us until 3.30pm (we close at 5) so it wasn't picked up until we were inputtingthat days data. The customer wanted to place an order for the following day for a funeral. She had omitted to give us any details when we saw the message at roughly 5.30 that evening, and she had given us no other way of contacting her either. Just what she wanted and that it was for a funeral.  The minute we read it we responded, asking what time the service was, where it was being held and what design would she like us to make for her; we did explain we may be limited on designs as it was so late in the day but would do our very best to help.

It took until 9.30 that evening before we got a reply (by now we had diverted the shop emails to our own personal email accounts) but then the customer still didn't fill in what details she wanted. She just said it needed to be delivered between 8 & 9 the following morning.  At this point, we did begin to wonder if this may have been a random person testing us to see how far we can be pushed (yes sadly that does happen a lot) but as we would with anyone because our customers are our priority, we again responded immediately asking again what item the lady would like as we wanted to try to see if we could get what she wanted; however did state that we weren' t sure we could deliver so early without knowing exactly where the flowers were to be delivered too, so again we asked for all the details we would ask any customer for. We never recieved any reply to this which saddened us as we would have done all we could to help out; sadly though we are only human and there is only so much we can do.