Last year, I got an email from a marketing intern at 1800Flowers, which I wrote about on this blog in a post titled “Advertisers Leave Me Alone.” In it, the intern was trying to get dads to write about 1800flowers in their blogs…for free, and then to link to the 1800flowers web store. She blathered (not so subtly) about how getting your wife or girlfriend flowers is a sure way to get in her pants. While that might be true, it’s not exactly what you want to send out to families in a marketing piece.
In the past I’ve had relatively good experiences with the floral delivery company, which is why I chose to use them again this year to send flowers to my lovely wife at work today. You wanna see what I ordered:
Beautiful right? Totally beautiful. Red roses, nice detail vase, and a note explaining my undying love for my wife of almost ten years.
But you wanna see what actually showed up at my wife’s office.
No vase – the flowers were wrapped in horrible purple logo plastic, inside a nasty purple box. You know why there was no vase? Because it broke. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal. But the delivery person actually wrote a hand written note they stuck to the box, which you can see in the image, that says:
Sorry the glass vase broke but we still wanted you to get the flowers.
1800 Flowers are you serious? Are you that bad of a company that you break the vase, then send it anyway without thinking to replace the vase or even call me to say the shit was broken.
But that’s not the best of it. They actually included the broken glass in the box. Check it:
But that’s not nearly all of the broken glass – the vase can’t be that big. It’s almost like they were trying to say, “we know we fucked up, and we probably shouldn’t send broken glass in the mail – you know, so no one gets hurt, like your 2 year old daughter, but we did want to prove that there was, at one point, a vase. See, here’s the glass.”
You can’t make this up people. It’s most surreal. But it’s not surreal. It is, in fact, true.
So I call 1800Flowers to find out what’s going on, and to, at the very least, get a return of my shipping fee. Unfortunately 1800Flowers is busy because it’s Valentines Day, and they can’t chat. Their phone support message says something to this effect: “Sorry, we’re too busy to take the call right now. Go to our website and log a message via email.” That is wholly unacceptable, so I took the case to twitter, where I tweeted the pictures and ridiculous stories to my network and to 1800Flowers support.
They did respond via twitter, but they required me to “follow” them before they could actually give support. Are you kidding me? There’s no way I’m following your company on twitter. Then my twit stream would be inundated with coupons and other shitty messages from them about the current day’s offerings.
As of the writing of this article no support has been offered from 1800Flowers. We’ll see what happens. Just in case you’re a 1800Flowers executive reading this blog, and I’m not sure why you would be, here’s a book you might want to read about customer support in the digital age: http://daddybydefault.com/book-review-zmot-winning-the-zero-moment-of-truth-by-google/.
Ladies, make sure you wear gloves before checking your flower deliveries tonight!
Happy Valentines Day.
