We know we can't compete with Amazon on the speed of delivery, for various reasons detailed below, but we believe we do much better than them on Customer Service.
You only need to check out the testimonials on the Guest-books to see how happy customers are with our service :-)
Dianne’s Knitting Yarns Guest Book
Craft Bits Guest Book
Craft Kits Guest Book
Delivery Speed has two components, how fast we process your order and how well Royal Mail delivers.
If you order before 1.30pm (12.30pm for Craft Bits orders) on a Tuesday or Friday your parcel will be posted on that day, with a few caveats.
If your order contains a Pre-order your order will be held until we receive the item from the supplier. However we never charge a card until the day we post out your order. Please see Charging Cards for more details.
If there is a problem with your address or your card details or stock, we will either phone you or email you - you choose which in the shopping basket when you order. Obviously if you do not get back to us before 2pm on that day your parcel will be held up. This is why we have "phone me" as the first option in the shopping basket as we really want to get parcels out if we can :-)
Royal Mail picks up the parcels at some point after 2pm, which is why orders already up, but with a problem, has a later time (2pm) than the order time (1.30pm).
We send all parcels by RM48 Tracked, so Royal Mail should deliver your parcel within 48 hours (not including Weekends and Bank Holidays). We let you know the Tracking number in the "parcel sent" email for you to check on the Royal Mail website. Obviously if your email is wrong you won't receive that email, your order email receipt, your transaction email receipt and no updates from Royal Mail. So please do double check your email address when you order and let us know if you don't get your order email receipt straight away. If we are closed our Out of Hours Service will help sort out any problems.
The next thing we are often asked is why we only send out parcels 2 days a week, the answer to that is a little more complicated.
When we decided to leave the Market (see Chapter Eleven and Twelve) we contacted the Peterborough Council to get permission to use part of Peter and Diane's house as an Office and storage, plus planning permission for a warehouse to be built in the garden. As the house was in a mixed business, residential and conservation area, they gave us the permission but put a few conditions on us, those were noted in our previous post about delivery times.
A few years later those permissions were updated to allow other family members officially to work for the business, among other things, and some of the conditions were changed.
To keep to those conditions, which are mainly around the number of people allowed to pickup and deliver to the address, we decided to work 2 days a week. We chose Tuesday and Friday instead of Monday and Thursday for one reason only, there are less Friday Bank Holidays than Monday Bank Holidays.
However, this does have a useful side effect for us - we only work 2 days a week in the Office / Warehouse which gives us time to do other things too. As we all have families and other work to do, we hope you understand why we are not unhappy about these conditions :-)
Dawn, who manages in the warehouse, has a family at home to look after and a husband (which is probably even more work) so has lots of shopping, cleaning etc to do on those days off. Both her children are grown up with jobs, but she still does a lot of driving them around and bigger kids seem to make just as much mess. She also does some of the more boring order booking for the records we need to keep for the Tax Man etc.
I (Carole) have a wonderful husband who works part-time, looks after the house and does the cooking (I did say he was wonderful). My daughter has a her dream job in a school and lives part of the week with Diane and Peter, which is nearer the school, so is only home on weekends. When I am not working in the Office my time is fully taken up with keeping all three of the CPU websites up to date and putting on new stuff - all hand coded. I am also currently creating some new websites which are database driven; it is a steep learning curve which I am really enjoying. That keeps me very, very busy - the family says too busy - but I do like to keep going or I would probably stop for good :-(
If you have read any of the rest of the blog you will probably know that Diane and Peter (the other two partners) are semi-retired (more like completely retired) so don’t really work in the business much, but we do always consult them on anything important. In the past few years they have spent most of their summers on their wide beam Narrowboat, they even spent all last winter (23/24) on the boat as their house needed rewiring. Luckily the work was finished in November 24, which is good as they have both had a lot of medical problems in the last few months which has stopped them going back to the boat. Hopefully they should both be improving over the next few months so they can get back to their floating home.
We do occasionally get notes from customers on orders for parcels to be sent as a priority. Unfortunately notes in the Message Box are not seen by the Office until the order is printed off for processing - so when we see the note it is as near being sent as possible anyway. However we do have an Out of Hours Service and, if they see the note, they will contact the customer to let them know of any delay and ask what they would like to do with the order.
The shopping basket does state the last order time and our opening days when you order.
Normally, if someone orders on a Tuesday or Friday after 1.30pm we will add a note in their account online stating it will be processed on the next Royal Mail pickup day. You can get to that account online via the link in your email receipt. That will show you when the order is with the warehouse, if there is any problem with the order and when it has been posted.
I hope this goes some way to explaining why orders placed after the cut off time on a Tuesday won’t be sent until Friday etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment