Hey COTH-ers,
First of all, thanks to all of you who’ve responded on here, DM’d me, emailed directly, or responded to our apology email earlier this week to let us know that you appreciated the communication, and in many cases, are still SmartPak fans. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to read your comments.
I’m sorry I haven’t checked in on this thread sooner, but it’s amazing how quickly the days go by here! I did want to update you on the status of our returns, which I know have been anything but quick lately.
Lots of what’s in this post is going to look familiar to @Jersey Fresh, since she emailed me directly yesterday, and I responded earlier today. But for the rest of you, hopefully this information will be informative and - ideally - reassuring.
Let me start by saying that we are absolutely, unequivocally, in no way intentionally holding on to returns for financial-related reasons. While I don’t doubt that that’s a practice out in the world, and I don’t blame everyone for being distrustful of “faceless corporations,” I can personally assure you - as someone who’s often the face and voice of SmartPak - we would never do anything like that. That’s just the absolute polar opposite of how we operate.
With that out of the way, I’d like to address some of the other questions/issues I heard in these recent comments:
How did our returns team get so far behind?
As I’m sure you can imagine, the post-holiday timeframe brings a huge volume of returns and exchanges for the team to process. And as you guys know all too well, we’ve had considerable struggles getting shipments out on time, due to a number of compounding factors, one of which is a labor shortage due to an extremely competitive environment for warehouse workers (thanks for reiterating that for me, @My Two Cents!). In order to get “all hands on deck” to help get orders out the door, we had to pull some of the folks who typically work on processing returns, and have them work in our fulfillment team. That of course put us even further behind than normal seasonal volume.
What are we going to do about it?
We solved our largest problem first, which was outbound shipping of normal orders. I’m happy to report that we (finally) have resolved that issue, and we’re now turning our focus to returns. I’m hopeful that we can right that ship within the next week.
Beyond that, we’ve already had several conversations and strategy sessions, and we’ve got an upcoming full-day “root cause analysis” project planned with a cross-departmental group of leaders from across the company, to help us fully understand all the different factors that contributed to this utter failure in service, so that we can learn from this and make sure we’re always able to hit the quality and service levels that made you all customers in the first place.
Why’d you send an apology email to some people and not everyone?
The apology email that went out earlier this week was targeted to customers whose orders shipped out late over the last several months. Unfortunately, we couldn’t realistically run a script to find all customers affected by any sort of service failure, which is why not everyone was on the list. We knew this was going to be the case, but we actually were counting on the fact that the horse community is small, and riders trust us to make things right, so if someone has had a negative experience and didn’t receive an apology, you’d email us and give us a chance to make it right. I’m really glad that @Jersey Fresh took me at my word and did exactly that. I really do want to hear from you guys when we let you down. We’re SmartPak, we can do better, and I trust you all to hold us accountable if we falter here or there.
Do you really think $25 is enough to make this right?
Absolutely not. We talked about this a lot, as a leadership team. There’s no across-the-board amount that’s going to make letting our customers down right. In the email, I tried very hard to explain that this gift code wasn’t intended to offset the bad experience - nothing can do that, the damage has been done. Instead, the gift code was intended to be an investment in what we hope to be a continued relationship. We’re telling you that we’re really sorry to have let you down, and that we really want the chance to prove that we are the same old SmartPak you’ve known and loved, and the gift code was an effort to “put our money where our mouth is” and invest in giving you a risk-free opportunity to give us another shot.
I hope you all understand that all of this information is intended as an explanation, not an excuse. As I said in my earlier post and in the apology email earlier this week, this recent service failure was completely unacceptable. We are embarrassed, ashamed, and deeply sorry. Our commitment to customer service has been core to our mission from day one, and over these past few months, we’ve failed to live up to that. While we wish there was something we could do to change that, all we can do is assure you that our leadership team has worked aggressively to solve the problem completely, and we’re actively working to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.
Thank you guys, again, for sharing your feedback and keeping us honest. While I hate hearing that we let you down, I firmly believe that the only problem we can’t fix is the one we don’t know about, so I always appreciate the opportunity to hear your concerns and address them directly.
If you have a situation that still feels unresolved, or you feel like your concerns weren’t effectively heard, I would absolutely encourage you to reach out to me. Hopefully @Jersey Fresh would recommend it as well, based on her experience.
Have a great ride,
SmartPaker Sarah
VP of Brand & Customer Experience
774-773-1410
SMann@SmartPak.com
I wasn’t trying to shoot the messenger, I am just super annoyed at Smartpak and how this has been handled.