Honesty or bad segmentation?

As a post script to Friday’s post, if you do royally mess up with your order fulfillment, then perhaps try honesty as a policy, per this email I received from another retailer who had clearly been experiencing problems…


Well, what a terrible start for us in 2007. With many of our staff absent from work through illness or cycling accidents we know our service has been poor.
So we owe you an apology – we apologise for the delays that were experienced by many of you who placed orders over the last ten days. We can however promise you that we are now back to full strength and we have just appointed lots of extra staff in our packing department.
We are raring to go.

Our January Sale has now started. We have some great bargains and the following are the ones we think you’ll like most of all.


Not that I had actually placed an order with them in the last six months, so they were either being remarkably candid about a problem I hadn’t personally experienced, or perhaps their customer database doesn’t allow much segmentation.