Lee.... Not taking his calls is a bad thing surely ?
We never 'ignored' a call from Alan, but this does need some explaining...
We started as a web shop with all comms online. The Cleaning Show was the first time we dealt with customers face to face. We sold A LOT of Aqua-dapters at the show, but even so with all the costs involved possibly only made a little or just broke even.
We are still a very small team, at the time there was only me dealing with Customer Service issues.
We had a telephone answering service. They would put calls through to someone else to take Sales Enquiries (someone who worked at the show with us, but didn't have an in-depth knowledge of the product).
Messages about Customer Service issues were forwarded to me, and I responded to every one with an email, usually within a few minutes, in virtually every case the same day.
I was personally dealing with all of this from 7:30am to 11:30pm most days including weekends and simply wouldn't have had time to call everyone back.
I did email in response to every message including all of Alan's messages and emails. I am not looking for sympathy, just explaining the situation.
After we won the awards at the show, we wanted to take advantage of the good publicity and get out and see more distributors and potential customers.
But, about a week later we started getting complaints about them becoming stiff. This had only happened occasionally before so we suggested the usual things that had caused the problem (needed cleaning, overtightening, twisted hose etc), but the problems kept occuring and we couldn't understand why.
A few weeks later through much effort we found that we had been supplied a faulty batch of plastic parts, which would swell after being in use for a few days! The plastics supplier has since gone out of business!
So we'd done nothing wrong (couldn't have foreseen the problem) but suddenly had all those Aqua-dapters out there that were possibly going to fail!
We published the info on our blog and offered replacements to everyone (rather than repairs) at considerable cost. Fortunately the vast majority of customers were very understanding and happy with the way we dealt with the situation. So rather than having an advantage from the show, we were now well down on where we hoped to be.
We'd always dealt with Customer Service issues by email (still do primarily) for various reasons of efficiency and having a record of what was said to who. Of course, when the email went out we suddenly were deluged with enquiries, returns etc., not to mention still trying to keep sales going!
Email was just the most efficient way of dealing with enquiries, and still is. We do have a Telephone Number, but still prefer email comms if possible, so there's a record of everything. Now that we have some more admin help, and don't have the situation of hundreds of returns to deal with while trying to keep the company afloat, we are able to call people more often now, as I mentioned to Scott on the other thread.
Paul
P.S. Going out now. Will check in later.
