365Astronomy Ltd Reviews 164

Reply from 365Astronomy Ltd

Nov 20, 2018

It seems customer mixed up the dates a bit.
Here is how it happened:
Tuesday:
customer called us and talked to John who checked availability of the Steeltrack focuser and asked customer to place order online, unfortunately Katie who worked in a care home in the morning had a flat tyre and arrived too late (4pm instead of 3.15pm) so she could not pack up everything and hence we unfortunately missed to dispatch the item despite our promise. (I've actually realised this about 5 min after the postman left...)
Wednesday:
customer called in and we apologised and advised that unfortunately we missed to fulfil our promise. he asked to dispatch the focuser anyway. This time we dispatched it with Special Next day service. John was not in on Wednesday, so he didn't know about all this.
Thursday:
customer called, John picked up the phone and when the customer realised it was him, he told him off about his mistake on Tuesday (which of course was not his mistake). John was quite surprised by the tone of his call, hence his response, i.e. that he had nothing to do with dispatches, which is generally speaking true. I took the phone and customer told me that not just that the item arrived one day later, but we failed to advise him about the possible incompatibility. It seems he expected us to take the blame for this and when this didn't happen the conversation went into a direction that in the end he started shouting at me at which point I had to put down the phone. First time in ten years of running this business.

There were several reasons for not advising the customer of optional adapters for the focuser:
1. according to my experience, those who need goods next day in a rush would nearly always do their research
2. probably most importantly, the product description clearly states that a variety of adapters available indicating that for the refractor version this will be a necessary addition (we expect that customers usually read the description, if not, I cannot see why the seller should take the blame)
3. we were in a middle of a major technical issue that caused extra workload and hence we had to focus on other tasks. If not this, and would there be a more relaxed environment, we might have gone into a longer discussion with a customer, during which we might have figured out that he was not aware of the need for an additional adapter

I'm really sorry that it didn't work out in between us.

re good practice
I'd like to mention how proud we are about the way we communicate with customers, the type of products we sell and the advise we give.
We frequently accept customers visiting us where sometimes we spend hours with them teaching them (for free) about how to use their equipment, what accessories they might need. Some of the customers who became our friends during the years even enjoy sometimes our observatory where they can use our equipment and do imaging.
There are about 35,000 customers who we served during the years, mostly for their great satisfaction, but of course occasional mistakes and issues are unavoidable in the life of any business, for what we are sorry if it happens.