Another Week - Another Delayed Order Notification

[&roo]

I'm getting really fed up with Scan! I made an order last week for delivery last Wednesday and got the dreaded "Delayed Order Notification" on Tuesday night so had to cancel the order. Made another order over the weekend for delivery Tomorrow (Wed 21 Nov) and have just had another "Delayed Order Notification". How when they accept the order and take payment early on Monday morning they cannot get the goods out of the door by Tuesday evening really beats me. It seems to me that Scan don't care or want people's business.

I've dealt with Scan since the days they were in a small building in Farnworth and we used to buy the Computer Mart on Thursday and dash over from the Chester area to get bits in our 2 hour flexi lunch break. I've introduced many friends to them and defended Scan on many occasions when people have had small problems. I think this is the end of the line for me with Scan.

I'll be cancelling my order again tomorrow and going elsewhere unless they are prepared to upgrade my delivery to before 9AM on Thursday FOC. Last time they let me down and I cancelled, I drove over to Micro Direct to get the bits I needed and I met several people in the queue who were disaffected Scan customers.

Andy

[Disturbedguy]

Delays happen, its all part of being a succesfull business.

The problems have been covered in numerous threads already on these forums.

To say SCAN dont care or want peoples business is wrong imo, if they didnt care or want peoples business, they wouldnt be on these forums offer FREE support and wouldnt offer FREE CARRIAGE to members of these forums who meet the rules they have set.

SCAN do there best to please everyone but, like everything, it is always possible to please each and every individual person.

[Chris P]

&roo

I apologies if your order has been delayed.

Our service levels shown clearly online and on every automated status update e-mail confirm our dispatch dates as estimated. Your order was delayed to a volume of orders and we did e-mail you to inform you of the delay precisely to prevent disappointment... I would ask you to respect the picking dept who ships hundreds of orders per day.

I Understand you have requested your order to be upgraded to pre 9am delivery free of charge, unfortunately this is not feasible as you have not paid for a guaranteed service, I would understand if you had paid for a next day delivery but you have not.

In fact the only service we do guarantee would be a Saturday delivery, if you had paid for this service level then we would of course refund the extra carriage paid for the Saturday delivery as we feel it only fair to refund a customer for a service level they have paid for but not received.

To say we do not care is unfair, do you really believe this is true ?

We DO understand the importance of timely deliveries and for your information we are in fact going through big changes at the moment so we can resume the service once offered of shipping same day

http://forums.hexus.net/scan-care-he...xpansions.html

If you can PM me your invoice number we can either ship tomorrow for delivery Thursday 22nd to an alternative address if this would be more convenient or if you still wish to do so cancel your order.

I truly hope your faith has not been dented beyond repair as we certainly do not wish to lose you as a customer. Our growth and development over the past 20 years has been largely due to return business from long-standing customers, who are all greatly appreciated. Thank you for taking the time out to email us and please rest assured that your comments have been read, understood and are being acted upon already in the background.

Best Regards

[sammie377]

Delays happen, its all part of being a succesfull business. Really?

The problems have been covered in numerous threads already on these forums. Agreed

To say SCAN dont care or want peoples business is wrong imo, if they didnt care or want peoples business, they wouldnt be on these forums offer FREE support and wouldnt offer FREE CARRIAGE to members of these forums who meet the rules they have set.

SCAN do there best to please everyone but, like everything, it is always possible to please each and every individual person.

We all know it's difficult meeting deadlines but imo something should be done there are too many of these threads.

[da_ging]

I apologies if your order has been delayed.

Our service levels shown clearly online and on every automated status update e-mail confirm our dispatch dates as estimated.

We DO understand the importance of timely deliveries and for your information we are in fact going through big changes at the moment so we can resume the service once offered of shipping same day

http://forums.hexus.net/scan-care-he...xpansions.html

Best Regards

estimated or not , if you fail to meet that date you will annoy the customer thats a fact, perhaps an ebuyer style "within 5 working days" delivery aim for the free carriage ones would be better and a higher priority for paid delivery orders


last post in the thread you linked to - 06-03-2007, and all i've seen in the past year is a worsening of service (stock is it in or out of and delays) in the last year so an update as to what is happening/going to happen would be good

[YorkieBen]

estimated or not , if you fail to meet that date you will annoy the customer thats a fact, perhaps an ebuyer style "within 5 working days" delivery aim for the free carriage ones would be better and a higher priority for paid delivery orders


last post in the thread you linked to - 06-03-2007, and all i've seen in the past year is a worsening of service (stock is it in or out of and delays) in the last year so an update as to what is happening/going to happen would be good

thats a fair point - scan have been saying that the move to a new warehouse all year and the problem seems to be getting worse (going by posts on the forum - not scientific I know but it doesn't seem to be random trolls complaining)

[Chris P]

da_ging

Of course delayed order's are annoying I agree ... we are under no illusion of this but too be fair we keep customer fully up to date at every stage of their order, I would agree if we took payment and left the customer with no progress updates but we do not.

The service certainly is not worsening, you haven't seen this sorry but that is not true!, what is the bases of this conclusion a handful of negative threads through this forum.....?, we do not just ship order to Hexus customer's ...we ship thousands of orders on time every day and the number of delayed orders are still isolated. The isolated delays, which do occur % 99 of the time are 1 day delay's..

How about I post every single time an order ships on time and every time an order is delayed, it will be like finding a needle in a haystack to find the delayed threads.

I agree the sticky has not been updated regularly enough so this is something we will resolve to update everyone on the progress we have made so far and the continued changes & expansions we have put are putting in place to ensure we keep moving in the right direction and can provide an even better service.

[Lucio]

da_ging
How about I post every single time an order ships on time and every time an order is delayed, it will be like finding a needle in a haystack to find the delayed threads.

Maybe that's not such a bad idea, or some kind of graphical representation on your site showing current service levels (or historical service levels minus key dates so as not to sway current consumer purchasing trends?)

[sammie377]

da_ging

Of course delayed order's are annoying I agree ... we are under no illusion of this but too be fair we keep customer fully up to date at every stage of their order, I would agree if we took payment and left the customer with no progress updates but we do not.

The service certainly is not worsening, you haven't seen this sorry but that is not true!, what is the bases of this conclusion a handful of negative threads through this forum.....?, we do not just ship order to Hexus customer's ...we ship thousands of orders on time every day and the number of delayed orders are still isolated. The isolated delays, which do occur % 99 of the time are 1 day delay's..

How about I post every single time an order ships on time and every time an order is delayed, it will be like finding a needle in a haystack to find the delayed threads.

I agree the sticky has not been updated regularly enough so this is something we will resolve to update everyone on the progress we have made so far and the continued changes & expansions we have put are putting in place to ensure we keep moving in the right direction and can provide an even better service.

That seems fair

[&roo]

ChrisP

I appreciate that most if not all mail order businesses deliver on a 'best endeavours' basis but in reality every other firm I've dealt with invariably deliver on the next or agreed day. To me, and I'd imagine to many other people, one important aspect when ordering for home delivery is arranging for goods to be delivered on a day when someone is in to take delivery. Emailing to tell me that you have failed to meet your estimated dispatch time is little consolation.

I am still very disappointed that I placed an order on Sunday which you acknowledge and took payment for Monday AM and you cannot get it dispatched be 8PM Tuesday. I'm particularly peeved as this is the second order in a row that has been delayed. When I cancelled the order last week I received an email that apologised and said "We hope you come back to us again and give us another chance", well I gave you another chance and look what happened! I'd certainly be interested to know how many of the orders that were placed AFTER mine were dispatched on the estimated date - maybe it's me you don't like.

Your comments about the changes your business is going through must be wearing a bit thin with many customers by now, your initial post was in January and your posted again in March indicating that things were improving. It's now November and based on my own experience and other posts in this forum you still have problems - Scan is certainly far from the firm it once was. Maybe you should update your Improvements/Expansions thread.

I'm afraid that my faith in Scan has been dented to the extent that I'll be looking elsewhere. If Scan were prepared to upgrade the service they pay City Link for to 'next day before 9AM' rather than 'next day' I'd believe they cared but it seems to be very much 'take it or leave it' from where I am. I suspect that these failures are not as isolated as you'd like us to believe and you don't want to set a precedent.

If I cannot arrange for someone to be in on Thursday, I'll cancel direct to CS in the morning.

Andy

[Disturbedguy]

Chris has explained - "I Understand you have requested your order to be upgraded to pre 9am delivery free of charge, unfortunately this is not feasible as you have not paid for a guaranteed service, I would understand if you had paid for a next day delivery but you have not.

In fact the only service we do guarantee would be a Saturday delivery, if you had paid for this service level then we would of course refund the extra carriage paid for the Saturday delivery as we feel it only fair to refund a customer for a service level they have paid for but not received."

You didnt pay for a next day delivery and as stated the dates are estimates.

I think that maybe everyone who has good experiences with SCAN should post it, im pretty sure it would out weigh the number of negatives.

"We all know it's difficult meeting deadlines but imo something should be done there are too many of these threads." - There are too many of these threads because people are all to quick to post negative things about SCAN and when people do recieve good service, most dont post.

Am probably going to get called a fan boy etc etc now or whatever but i dont care, people are too quick to jump on the "things are bad" bandwagon but when something is going good for people maybe 1 out of 5 will post when they have had good experiences where as others dont.

I can understand customers getting annoyed if they paid for a specific delivery date, like a saturday but the item didnt arrive, if your going to go for the standard service and go for the estimated delivery date, then i think you have to expect delays.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Meh -the order I placed on Sunday is also delayed for an unknown period of time.Luckily I am not in a massive hurry although delivery this week would be nice. I hope the PSU on my mates computers does not go bang in the mean time!
My last order from Scan was despatched within 24 hours so I suppose they are just busy at the moment.
An indication of how long the order would be delayed would be very useful though!

[Koolpc]

It is annoying to get a delayed order etc. I have had that myself but to be fair Scan are the best at keeping us informed and are trying to rectify the problem. It would be a good idea to have stock figures by each item and an instant reduction once one has been sold. I suppose this is something they are working on?

[&roo]

Disturbedguy

I assume from the "we" in your post that you work for Scan.

The repeated comment that I've "not paid for next day delivery" is beginning to irk me, my understanding is that it's next day delivery from the day of dispatch, if the day of dispatch is delayed it seems reasonable to me that Scan might want to upgrade the service to maintain goodwill. That is their choice and I accept their decision.

My mistake having dealt with Scan for many years is expecting the level of service I've had in the past. I can only imagine that Scan have now arranged their business processes to meet the requirements of b2b who are not too fussed when things arrive rather than the private customer who is. I order a fair amount over the Internet and generally arrange to have one day in a week when I have things to do at home so that I am there to accept deliveries. Having made my order on Sunday (and in the vain hope that they'd not fail twice) I let the estimated delivery date for Scan set the day I stay in this week. I ordered stuff from other firms on Monday evening for delivery today and all the orders have been dispatched and are on target for today, indeed one has already been delivered. Scan used to be able to do this but it seems no more. There are many other firms who can do it though!

Andy

[Disturbedguy]

No i dont work for Scan and what we are we talking about?

[Chris P]

&roo

Disturbedguy does not work for Scan and his comments are his own...

I am sorry to read of your dissatisfaction with the level of service that you have received from us and would like to offer my sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused by the delay in your order. Your custom is truly valued and I regret the circumstances that has prompted your e-mail, and the request to have your order cancelled.

Some of the points raised in your later post have been addressed but to re-itterate in more detail..

I do appreciate that it has been a real disappointment and that you waited in for the delivery, even though it was delayed, I would also respectfully suggest that, to be fair on the picking team they did send you an email on the evening of the 20th, which informed you in advance that there would be a delay. The reason why we send these emails is to prevent the very situation that you were in, ie waiting in all day for a delivery that isn't going to be there. We do say in all our correspondence, and on every delivery related page on the website it does ask customers to keep a close eye on their emails, and it also does stress that the delivery dates we give are estimates, not guarantees. I'm not saying any of this to be pedantic, just to explain to you in the hope that you can try to see from our point of view what has happened here and understand our system better for any future orders I hope you have with us, so that we never have this situation again. I could certainly understand your point if we actually advertised your delivery date as a guarantee, and we never emailed you to confirm that it was delayed, and indeed we emailed you to confirm it had been despatched. If that was the case then you would most certainly have a very very valid point. However, again I would implore you to consider that we honestly couldn't have any more systems in place from our end to keep people better informed.

I don't want you to think that I'm trying to be pedantic or argumentative or anything like that, please trust me when I say none of us are like this. We care a great deal about our customers and we do process orders with the utmost urgency. I do appreciate that you've asked for some compensation for the 1 day delay in your order, and I do appreciate your comments about the delay - however the fact does remain that you haven't paid for a guaranteed service - it is an estimate. Of course we aim to meet the estimate and have the best of intentions of fulfilling it when we take your order. We set our cut-off points as realistically as we can, based on volumes and resources, which usually means that when we set out to calculate the ETA on your order we can be confident that we can meet it. However, sales can often be very unpredictable and it is sometimes difficult to calculate how quickly the picking dept can get through the volumes we have, especially when we are shipping 1000's a day. Due to the nature of the business we understand that it is very difficult for us to make guarantees for every order we accept. This is why we do not guarantee in the first place!

Indeed, the only service we have which we guarantee is a premium Saturday pre12pm delivery, which Citylink charge us extra for and we in turn charge our customers extra for. If any Saturday deliveries fail due to a delay or error by either Scan or Citylink, we always refund the extra paid for the premium, and sometimes more. This is because it is a guaranteed delivery service, and we understand that if we fail on a guarantee then we should compensate people for it. To be honest, regardless of this, there isn't actually any carriage that I can refund, as you get free carriage anyway!

Please be assured that our normal level of service and turnaround efficiency for orders will resume very shortly when we've caught up on the volumes downstairs and got all this building work done in the new warehouse. Ironically enough, the disruptions of this very building work is what has caused most of the delays in picking we've had over the last few weeks, but this building work is also the biggest thing we've done in many years which will actually push us forward and help us get 100% better in our despatch and the efficiency of our picking dept. I guess sometimes it's a case of taking 1 step backwards then 2 steps forward in situations like this, but I assure you sincerely that we're getting there and we won't rest until we've got back to our normal Scan standard!

This new warehouse we have bought next door is a massive complex and the project has been ongoing for many months. We're all working really hard to get all this work finished as soon as we can but it's a huge job and it's not something that can happen overnight.

We really are aware of the problems that large scale distribution has brought as we have grown hugely over the last few years, and we are now investing time, effort and money into making improvements in the necessary areas. This is mainly based on staff and customer feedback, using particular examples of stock problems to identify the areas for improvement. Unfortunately, as we are shifting stock backwards and forwards at the moment, we are finding that the very thing which will help us to be much more efficient, is the very thing which is causing some stock problems and delays here and there in the process.

It's certainly not disruptive to every order thats coming through, but the process of these developments for the next few weeks may well continue to cause some isolated stock issues here and there, which I am afraid is a short term unavoidable consequence of such a massive overhaul in our systems. However, please bear with us and you will absolutely find that the whole ordering process itself will actually become much more consistent and streamlined in the near future.

We are always looking for ways in which to improve our service and, quite literally, our ears are always open to comments/suggestions. All the points you have made are important and have already been taken on board from present and previous customer feedback.

Going back to your pending order, again we cannot upgrade the delivery due to the reasons explained above and if I did so I would be setting a president, which I cannot do so..

We still have the order on our system awaiting dispatched .. I would like to ask a BIG favour by asking you to give us 1 more chance to ship this order on another date or an alternative address, I will ensure ships tonight for delivery tomorrow.

If I have not persuaded you to give us another chance and you unfortunately would still like to cancel the order then please PM me the invoice number and I will action this immediately for you.

Best Regards