Corporate Orders – How We Help

We talked about our corporate orders in some past blog posts already but whilst we spend more time talking about how they get processed through our system, we haven’t spent much time elaborating on the more Customer Service side of our Corporate team. The following are some examples of the service we provide or had provided for our corporate customers:1) Address Check

This is a service that we already provide for our online customers via a postcode checker in our online checkout, but since the corporate orders do not get processed through the online system, we can’t use the same function.

Instead, we receive a list of addresses from the company and a member of the team will go through the list to check each address. I think the most addresses I had ever check in one sitting was 120? It sometimes get rather repetitive, but it’s worth it in the end when it meant the gift arrives at the intended place.

Some addresses are a bit tricky though, namely the European addresses, and needed extra hunting through various online sources. Two years ago, my brother finished his Christmas temp job with us convinced that he now knew how to look up corporate telephone and branch address contact information in Spanish, German, Portuguese, Polish, French, Turkish and Italian. That was how many European addresses he checked.

Sometimes, we even catch a few repeat addresses which had snuck in by accident. These would need clarification as the company might not want to send the same basket to the same person in Switzerland twice!

2) The Right Basket, The Right Person, The Right Card

If you are ordering lots of baskets and they are all going to the same place, we would do our best and label each basket to ensure the correct basket goes to the right person with the correct gift message.

We attach these onto the delivery box of the package to ensure they get to the right people3) Additional Orders How indecisive!

We had lost count of the amount of times we had received last minute calls and emails from our corporate customers, asking if they could add on extra hampers onto their order, pretty please with cherry on top. More often than not, they just required one extra, sometimes two, maybe three and very occasionally a good few more. This is perfectly normal and understandable. Our team takes it in stride and make all the arrangements required for the extra hampers to be added onto their order.

In this respect though, last Christmas was very interesting for me. I seem to be spending my time taking one additional order after another. One company was practically emailing me every three days with a brand new address that MUST be sent out as soon as possible and they are very, very, certain this is the last one so pretty please can we rush it out to them? Of course, we were happy to help. But the process would repeat, and repeat, and repeat. To the extent that not only myself, but almost everybody in the office remembered the company secretary’s email address because it came up in our inbox so much.

Another company wanted to add on six extra hampers one week before Christmas, then reconsidered and changed it to five. Actually, they thought again, maybe three, nah, five, definitely five new extra hampers, please. You know what, I changed my mind, let’s have all six on again. No wait, never mind that! One extra hamper was enough!

4) Delivery Tracking

Throughout the year, our in-house tracking team would track all the deliveries going out then let the customers know when their orders were delivered. During Christmas, this service isn’t always available as the team gets re-assigned to various other departments and processes to help handle the increase of orders coming in. But corporate orders ALWAYS get tracked no matter what time of the year and we would keep the companies up to date with delivery statuses.

If we lose our in-house tracking team, then the Corporate team would just track the deliveries ourselves. Sometimes, we get lucky and manage to wrestle one of the Christmas temps out of the Processing Team’s hands to help us instead. Last year, two of my cousins and my brother were in as Christmas temps and I took great delight in poking them to track hundreds of baskets for me every moment they were free from the Processing Team’s clutches. They did so much delivery tracking that they started remembering the 10-12 digit tracking numbers of various problematic addresses.

There are various other examples of the service we provide but the above are the main ones. Are you a corporate customer? Can you think how we could help you more in your order with us?