Firstly, I'd like to make it clear that I agree that this customer received particularly poor service, for which we are sincerely sorry. I'll briefly explain a few of the circumstances in a moment. But I'd like to reiterate again something I remarked on another complaint recently, which is that we'd very much appreciate if anyone with service complaints could bring their concerns to our management first. Every single one of our outgoing emails contains a link to a special 'complaints' email address that goes to myself and the retail management. Or you can PM me from here. In this case I am told that we had not received a single email from the customer since the order was placed. And as regular readers will know, we do tend to take these things seriously when we know about them, and are usually able to rectify problems once we know about them...

The reason for the service failure in this case was basically two-fold. Firstly, we had a catastrophic technical failure of our office computer systems a few weeks ago, lasting almost a week. This led to our being unable to receive or process any orders or even communications. While the technical team worked night and day to get things working again, the retail team did their best to respond to the most urgent needs manually. But under these circumstances we have to prioritise customers with the most urgent things like weddings, and time is at a premium. This regrettably means that during such crisis periods not all (apparently) routine phone calls can be returned, as the staff are working flat out to help with what they know to be the most critical deadlines. The knock-on effects of catching up afterwards meant that it's only quite recently that we're fully back up to speed.

The second factor is coincidental. Some of you may recall another saga here regarding a sporran, where we'd found part of the problem was a misleading description/image. So our procedure is to rephotograph the same sporran next time one is received. To cut a long story short, it seems that each time the retail team printed out a packing slip, the stock team could not find the item in question as it was awaiting the photographer, and our retail manager who was the only person who knew where it was happened to be away on holiday for the crucial period. This has shown up a flaw in our procedures, which we've logged for fixing at our regular 'Issues' investigation & remedial process.

For what it's worth, the technical crisis is a bit of a symptom of our own success, due to the volume of orders we are now handling. We've built very sophisticated back-end systems which are generally remarkably good at handling a very complex business model with an incredible number of often-unpredictable variables due to the artisan supply lines we depend on, as I've described a few times before. But after the major work of technically fixing this latest episode, as of yesterday we've begun the huge technical task of re-implementing these systems from scratch on a very much more robust and scalable basis. This will take many months, at a cost I'm estimating in six figures. I only mention this as illustration that we do take problems seriously, and believe the best response is not just to 'fix' the immediate complaint, but to fully investigate and rectify underlying process problems.

I've also realised that I myself failed to do something I should have that I'll try to learn from. In the midst of the technical crisis, I should have stepped back a little more and used our Scotweb Blog to communicate the state of affairs, to help keep customers up to date with the latest situation. I know there's nothing more frustrating than being left in the dark. And this would have been a way to communicate more effectively, with a link to it from the Members' Area.

So that only leaves it for me to apologise again for the breakdown of service and invite the customer to contact my retail management if there's anything we can actually do to help put things right at this stage. And once again, may I recommend contacting our "complaints@..." email address, or myself directly as a first response if possible. Our customer service team has my every confidence at doing their utmost within the limits of their powers and responsibilities, and despite the scepticism I'm hearing would never intentionally mislead. But when it needs more than the usual, our management does work hard at keeping people happy and fixing problems. Please just let us know!

Thanks

Nick