TrishS@CigarBid Offline Posted: Thu, Mar 9 2017, 7:24 PM
Pudding Mittens wrote:
Earlier today, the main page, cigarbid.com (not some sub-page of the site) kept bringing up what appeared to be a .NET error message.
So, yeah, when your site's main page is a big fat application server error message, you're certainly not normal yet.
Great management! Giant disaster that's tarnishing your brand and permanently losing you lots of customers daily, and you decide not to add extra manpower to fix the problem, rather you tell the small number of existing people "do the best you can with what you have".
Result: you save $X by not adding temporary extra manpower, and lose $10X in customer defections, many of them permanent.
Also, no simple message on the top of the site briefly explaining things to customers, which shows good faith, retains customers and costs basically ZERO money and time to do!
Brilliant!
.
I cannot apologize enough for the frustration everyone is experiencing. Trust me - you have one order that's making you crazy...we have thousands.
In the time it takes to train extra manpower on the vagaries of CigarBid, the new computer system and to find a seat for them - keep in mind that all 120 phone lines are constantly in use - the crisis is over. Its not really as simple as it appears. We DID hire temps for the warehouse but CS isn't just answering the phones and you immediately know how to handle the situation or how to resolve it in the new system.
Orders ARE shipping. Now is the time for digging out from under it all. Yesterday, we shipped about 6k more orders that we took in from the websites. At that pace, we should be dug out long before 2018....
Tarnishing our brand - yes it might do that and that is a chance we're taking right now.
We are doing all that we can. Its now 7:20 pm. I've been here since 6 am this morning, responding to emails, contacting customers about their issues, etc. We're busting ourselves to fix it. Its just that overwhelming. The executive level is out in the warehouse picking and packing boxes to get them shipped. Everyone is pitching in.
I've been told to do impossible sexual acts to myself over and over today. Yet here I am, responding to your message after 13 hours of verbal abuse. Doesn't that tell you something about the dedication of the staff?
So I will apologize again and again sincerely apologize for the extreme delays. If you used this site before, you know this isn't how we operate. We will get back to that level of service again.