20 December 2018

Our business was going slow and smooth in general. However, on 17^th December, we received our first customer complaint via email where she stated her disappointment and concern of a dying plant from her terrarium that was bought during our OCBC event.

Upon receiving the email, Jia Xin forwarded it to our group chat to notify us all and we had to discuss on ways to address this problem.

After gathering all our thoughts and opinions, we decided to handle it in a professional manner where we avoid challenging the complaint. Instead, we apologized and requested for the customer to provide us with images and information so that we can better understand her situation. As the customer was looking for our location, we informed her that we are only operating at pop up booths and do not have any fixed location and also gave her details of our upcoming event (City Square Mall).

Jia Xin created a draft reply and some of us gave our inputs on how to modify the content to assure the customer that we will resolve the problem.

After 2 days , on 19^th December, the customer replied us with images attached for our reference.

As we are no expert in the field of plants, we decided to forward the images to our supplier – Pick a Plant to find out what had caused the plant to be in this manner. From their replies, we learnt that the plant was decaying and there was a possibility that over watering could have taken place.

We then recalled that when promoting and selling our terrariums, we inform customers that they only have to water them once a week. However, we failed to convey that we had already watered the plants for this week. Therefore, it may be a misunderstanding on both the customer and our side.

Hence, to resolve the issue, we decided to allow the customer to change her terrarium for one available at our booth during our event at City Square Mall.

The customer was appreciative of our actions and said that she will visit our booth when she is free.

Through this problem, we have gained experience in handling customer complaints as well as ways to identify over watering of plants. Our team managed to resolve the issue amicably by not placing the blame on anyone and acted quickly by replying within 2-3 hours each time. This can show our customers that we truly care and is listening to their words.