Jiaxin Entry #12

The first e-mail from our customer.

As the marketing and public relations officer, I was in-charge of dealing with Frond’s e-mail account and have have gotten it synced to my phone. On Monday morning, a new e-mail notification popped up! Eager to know what it was, I opened it right away.

To my horror, it was our first complaint letter.

After reading through, I informed the rest of my team members about it as we had to think of ways to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Fortunately, most of them were free and we discussed on ways to deal with it.

I replied the e-mail within 3 hours of receiving and this will show the sender that we value their email and are not trying to shirk responsibilities.

We decided to not offer an exchange or refund right away, as it might portray to the customer that this is a common issue that we face.

Therefore, we decided to do the following:

• Find out how the customer placed and water her terrarium
• Get the customer to snap some image if possible

This will allow us to assess the situation better as succulent require only minimal light and water. If it has been over watered, it will likely cause the plant to die.

Today, 19th December, I received a reply from the customer with photos attached.

As most of us met up at Ram’s place for the making of terrarium for our Christmas bazaar, we also discussed on our next course of action for this issue. At last, after viewing the photos we realised it is likely a case of over watering as water condensation could be seen at the side of the glass. We decided to offer our customer a one to one exchange as we feel that she cares about the plant more than having a refund.

Overall, I feel that I have attended the problem well by offering timely response and sounding genuine in the replies with the help of the other team members.

I always knew that as a business, it is normal to receive dissatisfied customers from time to time. Our business is in a greater risk as we are dealing with living things- the plants.

Prior to this, we have never thought of ways to deal with customers dissatisfaction / complaints. From this, we will have to prepare ourselves to deal with such problems by having an internal discussion on an appropriate exchange and refund policy that we deem reasonable to our terrarium.

Till next time!

Jia Xin