Consumers are starting to get fed up

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Flore

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Apr 3, 2008
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Has anyone been noticing a trend in consumers contacting you direct and asking if you were a real local florist?? I've noticed an uptick in the amount of these calls.

Today I actually had a consumer explain that she called information to get the number for a local florist in my town and they repeatedly gave her numbers for out of town florists that serviced my area. She complained to a supervisor and they finally gave her my number.

Fortunately she was adamant about only speaking with a local florist, and had the perserverance. How crazy she had to go through such trouble to get a telephone number!! She sounded so relieved when she finally got hold of me. She explained that she's had such bad experiences receiving flowers from .com florists, she wanted to make sure the flowers she were sending were going to be unique.

Hopefully this is a new trend....(not the calling information part, though...)
 
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YES! I have had this same questions many times. One customer told me
she spoke with an shop who was listed as being in our city, only to find out
they were hundreds of miles away.
 
I would say 5 out of 10 "new callers" ask that question.
The other 5 say "I'm looking at your website".............
 
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I had one customer call me after being on hold with one of the OG's for a long time.
I told her we will never make her wait and she will get better service from us without paying for the large service fee.
Yippee, one more converted ; )
 
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See, It's JUST like I said in another post....We ARE winning against the D'OG's......One Shop, One Customer at a time.
 
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shannonlovesflowers said:
yep! We keep refusing the OG's orders and then the customer calls us direct and we get 100% of the order! It may be a drop in the bucket, but it's still a drop!
Click to expand...

it's "more" than just a "drop"......we started "noticing" this trend last year, sometime BEFORE last Christmas, and it has NOT abated.....
Our out of town customer database has literally exploded......
 
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Outsourcing OG jobs to the Philippines isn't new, nor is the revolving door job of 'JustFlowers Customer Service Manager'.

Rick, not sure we're winning against dOGs, but we sure don't turn folks off to ever buying flowers again at the rater the dOGs do.

Took 5 generations to put flowers as a top-of-mind gift and only one to 1 to threaten to ruin it.
 
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I posted that because I hear so often we're winning, and we aren't.


I think the reason many feel we're winning is they're now finally "on the web" getting internet orders, like the OGs and DOGs have been doing for 10 years.

JF wouldn't have felt the need to put in a 100 seat call center in the PI nor would FST needed a second call center in Dallas if local florists were recapturing that many orders back from them.

I think, for the sake of discussion, you're right and wrong about turning people off to buying flowers. Failures are way too often because senders rely on unprofessional fillers.

No big sender wants complaints, or is unconcerned about them, since the days of the Macon Ga dude(tte) or maybe the Vancouver ripoff dude. We just hear about more complaints because their orders number in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

For instance, wesley has 42 complaints on the Complaintsboard.com and I'm sure that's a very low percentage of their orders processed. Earliest one I believe was 3/15/08 which is over a year ago.

I'm fairly sure 800TFTD has a faily low percentage as well.

As much as I'd love to say we're winning, sadly we're not.:corky
 
bloomz said:
(cough) is that a Unicorn I see???

now what are we gonna do about 800PROTFTD?
Click to expand...
Jon, Jon, Jon....

They would die a sudden death if no one filled their gathered orders... but alas, some always will....

And yes, it is a Unicorn, with Merlin Olson riding it.
 
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BOSS said:
Jon, Jon, Jon....

They would die a sudden death if no one filled their gathered orders... but alas, some always will....

And yes, it is a Unicorn, with Merlin Olson riding it.
Click to expand...

We'd have world peace if people would just learn to shut up too.
 
I do get the "i'm so glad you're a real local florist" caller conversation daily. I did not get them as much last year, so I'm not sure what is going on. I don't know if it is just so much with flower shops, but our community has really bolstered the local businesses lately and that might have something to do with it.
I have noticed though that a lot of out of town orders want to know that I am a real b&m shop and not some call center, so there is some change in the air and this pessimist smells change in the air.
Maybe it's unicorn poo
 
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