Florists and consumers alike continue to react with anger and disappointment brought on by FTD’s failure to deliver both flowers and orders during Valentine’s Day week.
Left in the wake of the FTD Mercury Direct failure are thousands of customer orders that never reached florists for fulfillment - or Valentines to express love - during the busy holiday period.
On the florists’ front, some long-time FTD member flower shop owners have reported taking down their logo signage and scraping decals from windows and delivery vans. As Mike of Holden’s Florist, Dundas ON said in his comments to the previous article:
It’s so sad, that such a high profile “dis-organization” could lack such respect for it’s OWN customers in a way, as to deny that THEY were entirely responsible for the V-Day meltdown, and quickly take charge, control, and admit to it’s antiquated equipment failure!!
Order transmittal is ESSENTIAL to many florists, and is an integral part of the florist business…it’s too bad that FTD’s lack of integrity, has lost them the internal trust they ONCE had from florist members, and their customers!!
On the consumer front, FTD continues to take a beating in shopper rating sites such as BizRate, The Consumerist, Yahoo, Epinions and PlanetFeedback.
One flower buyer has been so angered at FTD’s lack of delivery and poor customer service that he created DontUseFTD.com in protest. Eight days after placing his order, he finally got through to FTD’s customer service.
“Yes, we’ve been working 14 hour days trying to catch up.”, she said. “There was a weather related emergency and DHL could not deliver thousands of orders.”
DHL? There are several, if not dozens, of florists within blocks of the address I wanted flowers delivered too. Why on earth would you SHIP them?
I returned, “I doubt they would have been shipped. I do have my order number if that would help.” and she took my order number and began typing away. “Oh”, she said, “this order was handled by a florist, let’s see what happened. Oh, I see, the order was rejected. We have been trying to contact those people for days, we must have missed you.”
One florist rejecting an order would have been no big deal if FTD’s technology hadn’t failed - but with the Mercury Direct break down, many rejected orders disappeared into a dark hole and didn’t reappear until well after they could be re-routed for prompt delivery.
(Does anyone else think the CSR’s explanation made it sound as if the non-delivery was a local florist’s fault?)
FTD’s Valentine’s Day 2007 menu was promoting far more lower-priced, high margin, DHL delivered boxes of flowers (even though they looked like arrangements on FTD.com) than florist-delivered, professionally designed flowers. So while local florists were heroically getting flowers to Valentines through near-blizzard conditions in many parts of the country, FTD’s DHL delivered boxes, primarily shipped from Miami, had much further to travel - and missed many Sweethearts on their big day.
FTD could have contacted their customers about the weather delays - or placed a notice on their website, or sent out an email broadcast - just as thousands of local florists did - but instead, FTD chose to leave calls and emails unanswered and Valentines in the dark - for days.
This holiday debacle won’t soon be forgotten.
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