I would like to have a chance to respond to your post and why we had a little bit of a bumpy ride this Valentine’s Day.

The major issue this year was not because of a lack of service staff planning or supply chain management. This year was different as we experienced a DDOS attack on our systems (all of which are hosted on our own private cloud, including the phone systems) that started early morning on the 14th and continued for a period of 24 hours. This affected our ability to manage and control transactions as effectively as we would have expected.

You are right, service does matter a huge amount, just as much as getting the customer in the door and in turn sending the flowers and gifts to their loved ones door. That is why over the Valentines Period we employ 65 staff across Australasia and roughly 4000 suppliers around the world to cope with the demand. Under normal “event day” periods this should be more than enough to manage the spike in demand over the few days.

Even with the attack on our systems, we were able to manage to straighten things out reasonably quickly however we still did have around 4 hours of downtime and 24 hours of slower than optimal systems. Out of the tens of thousands of transactions that we processed, we received a small rate of issues (mostly due to the attack) with most enquiries on orders received resolved relatively quickly.

We have now taken steps to ensure that even with a DDOS attack on our systems, we are more than capable of weathering these actions in the future if they occur again.

Lastly, we definitely value our customers and want them all to have the best experience possible and that is why we do place a huge amount of importance on customer service by investing a large amount of time, money and effort into developing the systems just as much as the customer service staff to provide our valued customers with that great experience every time.

Regards,

Thomas Hegarty
Managing Director – Ready Flowers Limited

Add to that, few business owners or managers know whether they are optimised for search and if they are paying for an “SEO service” whether it is any use at all. Much of it is just a scam. So not only is SEO not the full story even the SEO they think they are doing may be lacking. Then there is the optimisation for People, which is often a forgotten element.

The process for business to undertake to get things right before visitors find the site (search) or the business drives visitors to the site (SM) and what happens while the visitors are on the site, and progressing through the stage of buying, then to fulfillment stage is so important yet may be left up to people who are not skilled in some of those areas (IT people handling customer service issues for example). This is where it will show if there is not a well constructed strategy and process to ensure all these bases are well covered.

In many cases we get obsessed with getting our website optimised and the logo looking good and forget the essentials of customer service.