Hi muddyfox470,
I do appreciate what you're saying and I can see that you originally requested delivery on 10/10/2007, which meant we would have had to ship it on the 9th for it to get there on time. However, it was delayed 1 day due to the volumes we had in the warehouse. We are experiencing a large backlog at the moment, due to a massive expansion and restructuring project of our warehouse coupled with an unusually and unexpectedly high volume of sales for this time of year. Despite the major disruptions of the building work and the additional pressure from the massive increase in volumes, I can assure you that our picking team is working as efficiently as possible to clear through the backlog of orders and we are doing our best to get people's order to them on their Requested Delivery Dates.
Whilst I do appreciate that it has been a real disappointment and that you waited in for the delivery, even though it was delayed by 1 day, I would also respectfully suggest that, to be fair on the picking team they did send you an email on the evening of the 9th, 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 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.
Again your order has been delayed by 1 day and to say to stop taking orders because of a 1 day delay to a non guaranteed service is ridiculous..
Hexus customer's are treated like "Gods" and probably God himself would be put to the back of the que! before you guys ! - Not forgetting
WE OFFER THIS SERVICE FOR FREE !!
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. 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 dispatch 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!
Shortly we will be posting through the sticky " Improvements / Expansions ", to explain in detail the new system we have already introduced to improve our service levels. as we realise the we have not really updated our customer's with the progress we have made so far.
I am very sorry about the disappointment you have experienced and I truly hope your faith has not been dented beyond repair we 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. We hope we can still look forward to your business in the future and thank you once again for your patience and understanding despite the delay.
Your order is currently in picking and is due to be dispatched today for delivery tomorrow. Please continue to check your automated e-mail for status updates.
If you ever need anything at all in the future please don't hesitate to contact me.
All the best,