In reponse to this is a simple question......and I hope it does not come across as rude or condescending.......
What steps are you taking and doing to reverse that consumer mentality and way of thinking in your local service area?
Almost daily, in my interaction with the customers at Carolina Pottery, I am extolling the virtues of reputable local florists and explaining why doing business with the d'OG's is a bad choice.
Ricky,
Really good question. And, no, I do not take offense to you asking!
The biggest thing I've done was to drop FTD. We've gone from being with 3 wire services at one point (many years ago) to being wire-service free as of May 1st this year. After last Mother's Day, I told myself "never again". We had so many orders coming in undervalued, or too late to be delivered when they wanted them, or time-wasting phone calls after we had already rejected the order, or my personal favorite-delivering orders that came in the Monday after Mother's Day and having our local recipients chastise us for not getting the orders out on time!!
We are with Flower Shop Network (mostly for sending orders out-we still have a number of customers who come to us for that) but we don't receive many orders from them. They also realistically advised their florists NOT to guarantee delivery on orders placed after noon on Friday. We would recommend to our customers to call direct if they wanted something sent after that time.
We now have our own website from Strider so our customers can find us conveniently online. I realize it's often a convenience thing for the people who order online....I noticed most our orders came through in the evening after most traditional shops would be closed. We shut down our delivery at noon on Saturday and didn't offer Sunday delivery on our website, but any orders that came through and asked for MOnday delivery (if they were for Mother's Day) we tried to deliver on Sunday. That way we were under-promising and over-delivering...kind of the opposite of the .coms!
I do educate customers when given the chance and in the right situation, but am careful how I do so. It's a fine line between education and coming across as preachy and self serving. It's probably a little easier for you in that you're not speaking as a representative of a local florist, so your suggestions can come across as sincere and good advice. I can tell you it's hard for me to NOT respond to all those complaints on the FB pages and say "just order locally and you wouldn't have paid that $18.00 service fee to start with!". Luckily, some other customers are chiming in and responding with that message.
One of the most important things all of us (as local florists) can do is GIVE GREAT CUSTOMER SERVICE! When we do get that phone call from out of town (especially on a major holiday when the big companies are pounding the advertising) we MUST see them as the GOLD they are. The person on the other line may be someone who had ordered from ProFlowers, or FTD.com, or 1800 in the past and had a bad experience. This is our opportunity to shine! Sadly, I see a number of posts here referring to situations where customers were treated less than well by local florists (mostly posts where Flowerchatters got the phone call AFTER another florist had made the customer feel like S*** for some reason or another. I think Eric and Shannon both had some experiences like that....)
We're the professionals...we better act like it. We all know how it is for Mother's Day and Valentine's Day every year. We all know people call last minute. I think it's up to us to do the best we can to handle that business when it comes in...rather than lament the idiot customer who waited til the last minute--again! I do realize that we can only predict to the best of our abilities. We can only order so much product and handle so much volume. But I also think that a lot of florists have the attitude that there's more business than they can handle at certain times of the year and that turning some of it away is just part of the deal....some are even smug about it. I'm quite certain some of them could spend a little of their downtime figuring out how to be more efficient or streamlined at holiday time so they can handle more business and make more money and more customers happy. Sorry if I sound like I'm on a soapbox, but I have seen this attitude among my own associates! On Sunday I overheard one of our newer associates telling a customer, "sorry, we can't deliver for you today". Ok, maybe we couldn't get that order processed and delivered that late on Sunday afternoon...but she never gave any other options such as "Sorry, we can't deliver that for you yet today, but we would be happy to make up what you would like and you can pick it up in the store and deliver it yourself" or "Sorry, we can't deliver that for you yet today, but we would be happy to take it first thing tomorrow". Even if the customer didn't choose one of those options, they would have at the very least felt like we were trying to come up with a solution for them. How many times have we heard a customer service representative say "sorry" and get the feeling they were anything but. Anyways, that was a good opportunity for some training!
Once again, didn't start out intending to write a book but.......
