We promise to answer all phone calls on the first ring, we promise to answer all e-mails within 10 seconds of you hitting the Send button and we promise to ……
And then reality set in. We took a look at the Customer Service Goal that was originally created for us (US Darts's customer service goal is simple: We are committed to providing our customers total satisfaction. Every time. Guaranteed.) and laughed. Who puts these things together? It is just like that perky young woman from Limited Two that keeps automatically dialing us and telling us about the latest sales. You just want to shoot them.
Here is what we try to do:
1) Ship all orders within 24 hours assuming that it is not a holiday, the weekend, vacation time, or we are just having a bad day.
2) Return all phone calls within 24 hours providing we can understand your message, you leave your number, and you are not rude to us.
3) Answer all e-mails within 24 hours. The same rules apply as in #2 but please read the notes on E-mails below.
The only piece of the original Customer Service text that we kept is:
Please feel free to drop us a line to share your thoughts on the site, all comments welcomed.
E-mails
E-mails are the life and death of us. They can be very helpful and very annoying both to us and you.
We try to answer all the sensible e-mails within 24 hours but with all good intentions we can sometimes fail.
There are four main reasons you might not have received an answer to an e-mail that you sent.
- We did not receive your e-mail
- You did not receive our e-mail
- We haven't got around to replying yet
- We couldn't be bothered to reply to your e-mail
We did not receive your e-mail
We receive about 1000 e-mails a day at our server. The anti-spam and anti-virus software removes about 700 of these. At our system level, Symantec also filters those e-mails and reduces the number we see to about 150 a day.
One of the main causes of e-mails not reaching us, is if you use a combination of letters and numbers in your address, use hotmail, use yahoo, or one of the other popular spam friendly ISPs. This means that if your e-mail ends up in our spam folders we will never see it. So if you don't hear from us, try giving us a call.
On our system we see about 20 spoof e-mails a day which appear to be from our website. It is always possible that we could have deleted your message by mistake as we attempt to clean out the clutter.
You did not receive our e-mail
Do you have anti-virus or spam filters which will prevent our e-mails reaching you. It is very frustrating to type a long reply to someone and then have them complain about not getting a reply. Again, if you don't hear from us, try giving us a call.
We haven't got around to replying yet
We try to answer every e-mail we receive. However given the volume of requests it usually takes 24 hours and in some cases 48 hours to answer. They are usually the last thing that we look at after shipping orders. We get more complaints about slow shipping than slow e-mails. It can also take up to 5 days for an e-mail to reach you if it gets into Internet heaven.
We couldn't be bothered to reply to your e-mail
Yes, there are some people who will never get a reply. The guy wondering how badly his dog Fluffy would be hurt by a stray dart is still waiting a reply. Abuse e-mails and crank e-mails will also be given a miss. There are a bunch of loonies out there. Don't offer us Viagra or A Hot Date Tonight. You won't get a reply.
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