"Sheldon Brown" wrote in message
...
jbuch wrote:
Jeff Starr wrote:

I needed to call Harris to supply my CC #, so that my order
could be
completed.

Well, between 6-15-05 and 6-23-05, I tried 54 times. Each time
getting
their recorded message, that they were helping other
customers. Well,
I finally got through on the 55th attempt, only to find out
they had
been short handed and not answering that line.

jbuch wrote:

I had the same experience. Not up to 50+ calls.

Really sounds like poor customer relatonships......

Really poor.

I now will only consider Harris if they are selling something
that no
one else seems to have.

Just too poor customer relationships.

The insulting message is said so fast that you have difficulty
in
getting the email address correct.

There is a deep insensitivity to customers here.

Very sorry you've had problems. We're a very small shop, but
growing
rapidly, and suffering "growing pains" as a result.

I haven't heard the 'phone message involved, but I will look into
this
and see what can be done to make the situation clearer.

During the busy season, we are best able to fill orders placed
via our
secure Web-based shopping cart system. Second easiest is email
orders,
but there are security issues with that.* Phone orders are much
more
difficult for us to deal with when things are busy.

Here in the Northeast, the bike business is rather seasonal.
Everybody
bike business has to choose between two unpleasant alternatives:

A. Thin out the payroll in the wintertime, then bring in
untrained new
hires for the spring/summer rush season. This makes it
difficult/impossible to retain good, competent people.

2. Keep a full-time workforce which will tend to be stretched
pretty
thin during the high season. This approach does permit retaining
good
folks.

Every northern bike business has to use some combination of these
strategies. We are fortunate that the Internet business helps to
even
things out, because the Internet side doesn't die out as badly in
the
winter as the local business does.

When things get really busy, we have to cut back somewhere, and
the most
time intensive aspect is taking phone orders. In the time it
takes to
field a phone call, one of our folks can often fill 3 or 4
Internet orders.

The folks in the Internet department know a lot about bikes, and
a lot
about parts. They work hard and pretty efficiently by and large,
but
none of them is a good typist. When they handle phone orders,
they
generally are reduced to writing down the details on a slip of
paper,
then later transferring the data by hunt-and-peck to the computer
system. In addition to being slow and inefficient, this is error
prone.

We consider filling actual orders that we have received to be a
higher
priority than taking new orders that we may not have time to fill
in a
timely fashion.

We're working on upgrading our software and inventory control
system to
get around this, but it's very difficult for a small company that
has
such an unusually large selection of SKUs to deal with.

We're really just a little neighborhood bike shop that has
gradually
been oozing into the Internet/mail order business.

Our business has been built on customer service, and we endeavor
to
maintain this tradition, but a growing business can't always keep
up
with everything.

*
If you can't use the secure shopping cart and want to order by
email, a
few simple precautions can increase the security of sending your
credit
card. I often do this myself in placing email orders from
suppliers.

•Don't use keywords like "Visa","Mastercard" or even "card" or
"credit"
or "expiration." You don't need to say what kind of card it is,
that
information is revealed by the first digit of the number.

•I sometimes substute the letter "o" for the digit "0"

It is my impression that these precautions will make your email
pretty
much safe from snoopers. I believe they look for keywords and
possibly
for characteristic groupings of digits as in "#### #### #### ####
##/##"


You need to outsource your customer service to New Delhi. I
works for Dell, sort of. -- Jay Beattie.