Customer Service Update/Request

[Failmingo]

Good morning! It seems like most folks saw our announcement about DOUBLE LUNACY, and I wanted to follow that up on the more private channels with an update about the state of our Customer Service, aka Ted P. Barrial, email-slayer extraordinaire, who is also packing most of the orders.

 

By now most BPAL fans have gotten the memo about the urgency of our situation over here, in terms of too much work being done by too few people. But we've also gotten a lot of new customers during the pandemic (yay!) who don't really know anything about what's going on behind the scenes (boo! but not their fault) and have more intense expectations in terms of accessibility and order turnaround.

 

Anyhow, every hour Ted spends answering emails is an hour when X amount of orders don't get shipped out. And bit by bit, week by week, this has contributed to a major slowdown, which is why we're still struggling to complete orders that people made a month (or longer) ago.

 

And this, dear faithful readers, is one factor in the decision to bump Lunacy farther down the road: as sorely as we need the business, we simply can't handle the influx of new orders.

 

I know many of you are already only emailing etc. as a last resort, but it still behooves me to issue a reminder that Pandemic Roolz are still very much in effect, and our labor shortage has got the remaining crew working 6-7 days a week and we're STILL falling further behind.

 

There's not much anyone can do to help, but one way is that if you see anyone grumbling about the turnaround time or about our Customer Service, you can gently (because we want to keep them around!) catch them up on our situation.

We are not Amazon. We are not Target. Heck, we're not even BPAL in terms of how things were running a year ago. We are starkly limited in our ability to scratch every itch or see further ahead than this week.

 

If you want to inquire about something but don't want to slow Ted down, you're welcome to email me (tom@blackphoenixalchemylab.com) and I will field the question as best I can. I also check the DM's on Instagram, where we field all kinds of random queries, and you're not bothering anyone there since it's just ME DOING MY WONDERFUL JOB, and I don't think Beth or anyone else gets distracting notifications from that.

 

This message is appended with a lovely photo of Dorothy Parker that we can all deeply relate to, although thankfully I don't think any of us at the Lab are hitting the bottle quite like that. We don't have time! Selling perfume is our drug of choice, and we are REALLY chasing the dragon these days.

 

Thank you for listening!