I have to say that I am generally a pretty easy-to-please customer, particularly for something like floral delivery. A few basics that I expect include: 1) if you accept my order for a particular day, I have faith you will deliver on that day; 2) if you are unable to deliver (even though you accepted the order), I expect to be notified in a timely manner so that I can make other arrangements.
For Valentine's Day I ordered a bouquet for my wife through Teleflora two days before the holiday. Delivery was to scheduled for the 14th, great! On February 15th, I received an email from Teleflora telling me they were unable to make the delivery (with no reason provided) and I was asked to call or email to reschedule delivery. Logically, one would assume ASAP since the holiday had come and gone, but - no - Teleflora needed ME to contact them to tell them another delivery day. I, of course, requested delivery on the 15th via email.
I also tried to call them on the 15th 3x and spent over 20 minutes on hold each time before giving up. On the 16th, I continued to try to call as the flowers had not arrived on the 15th either. Again, I tried 3x and was on hold for an unreasonable period of time trying to reach a human being. Needless to say, I was pretty frustrated.
Finally, on the evening of the 16th I finally got a hold of a customer service representative. Ironically, I was on hold with them on one line while they called me on another line. At that point, I was quite irritated and asked why they didn't 1) let me know they weren't going to be able to make delivery on the 14th on the 14th (or before); 2) why they hadn't automatically rescheduled delivery for the 15th; and 3) how were they going to compensate me for the fact that - at the earliest - the flowers were not going to arrive until the 17th (3 days after the holiday!!!).
The customer service representative was only able to tell me that they had far too many orders and that local suppliers couldn't handle them. While I acknowledged it wasn't this particular person's fault, I also asked him whether Teleflora was reviewing how it accepted and processed orders around the holidays - in my view, if you can't handle the volume, don't accept the orders. He didn't know. However, he did give me a 30% discount (and if I don't see that reflected on my next credit card statement...)
So... Flash forward to the 17th, and I received another email saying that the delivery information I had provided was incomplete and I needed to call them again. I pulled up the order from the web and, sure enough, all of the information was there — address, suite, city, state, zip code, telephone number, name of recipient... After 15 minutes on hold (an improvement!) I was connected to a human being — whose system didn't include the zip code. One would think that they would have first checked the ordering system (which is evidently not connected to the delivery system) before bothering the customer again... But, no. Too logical.
So, FINALLY, my wife received her Valetine's Day flowers on the afternoon of the 17th, 3 days late. Fortunately, I had picked up a second set of flowers on the way home, so I wasn't in the doghouse, but REALLY? In this day and age, for a company like Teleflora to provide such poor service... inexcusable, and I certainly will NEVER use them again.
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