I’ve been a long standing customer of ArenaFlowers.com for years and have always found them helpful and friendly. I was therefore very surprised at their casual indifference to a problem I had recently resulting in flowers I ordered for my grandmother being delivered 10 days after the order date and 6 days after she passed away (and so being delivered to my grieving grandfather with a card saying ‘Get Well Soon’).
While initially Arena Flowers responded saying that I must have changed the delivery date and so its down to me – despite me pointing out that I never touch the date field and always accept the next available slot,, they eventually acknowledged that some flowers on their website were unavailable due to mothers day and so when ordered, the default delivery day wasn’t the next working day as it usually is but rather a week later.
When I pointed out that some sort of a heads up would have been good, I got a simple ‘well pass that on to our designers’ response.
What amazed me here is that while admittedly I didn’t spot the date difference (as I’ve never ordered for a specific date), a service that does two things – provide flowers and provide prompt delivery – didn’t give any sort of warning or notification when one of those couldn’t be met. At the very least I’d have liked a pop-up telling the flowers weren’t available for a week and give me the option to select an alternative.
Now mistakes happen and I could accept this but their glib robot-like responses to an oversight by their web developers that resulting in a very upsetting experience for an already grieving husband were shocking.
Not once was there an apology – perhaps given that my Gran had passed away and most of my orders were for her they saw reduced revenue from me so I wasn’t important anymore.
After years of loyalty I’ll now be taking my business elsewhere – I’ll be checking out www.serenataflowers.com and www.nextflowers.co.uk next.
