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Post by RED on May 6, 2006 22:31:43 GMT 1
I have had no problem with late delivery of blinds ..... UNTIL this week , and 4 customers are to be let down! (mixture - but mainly Rollers) Why has this suddenly occured ! and coincidental ? all the posts this week about missing product and late deliveries ? Some thing has gone badly wrong at colwick and/ or washington. Are they going to come clean and tell us? I dont think it is anything to worry about, just a backlog caused by all the bank holls we have had and also a massive upsurge in orders. A small price to pay for more orders coming in really. Red |
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Post by desmorse on May 6, 2006 23:28:36 GMT 1
I'm with golfsthegame on this one. I took 60 orders last month, I really wouldn't want the hassle of ringing round all these. I've booked fits at sale for over 3 years now, and whilst late deliveries are a minority, they are a real pain in the @rse
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Post by RED on May 7, 2006 12:47:09 GMT 1
I'm with golfsthegame on this one. I took 60 orders last month, I really wouldn't want the hassle of ringing round all these. I've booked fits at sale for over 3 years now, and whilst late deliveries are a minority, they are a real pain in the @rse Thats 15 fits a week so spread out over the week its an average of 2 calls a day to arrange fits. Not too difficult but its what works best for you. Some find booking on Sam helps, others like myself have to run my diaries around two children's schooling and 1 fitter that never knows what days he can do till the week before so I find it impossible to arrange fitting two weeks prior but as I said, do what works for you. Each person has to adapt the system to suit. Red |
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Post by BLAZER on May 7, 2006 13:20:26 GMT 1
Customer ordered pvc blind and a curved headrail.Explained lead time would take 3 weeks because pvc is made in Belgium.No problem. Three weeks later the Louvre's from Belgium are delivered as are the Louvre's for the curved but no sign of the headrails.Customer is informed and a new fit date arranged for the following week.
Headrails finally arrive.Pvc is fine, however wrong top fix brackets are sent for the curved rail. Search high and low for spares but don't have enough to finish the Job.(only 2nd curved in six months of doing the Job) Customer p...off but service centre promise delivery next day. Next day package arrives, however they have packed the wrong brackets again! Customer really p... off now, thankfully her anger is directed at the company for it's poor back up. She is assured by hillary's she will be compensated for the delays and that I will be contacted and the brackets delivered the following day. In the meantime after trying to get through to the service centre three times, each involving a wait of 20 +mins on the phone, I finally get to file my complaint.
The result is 4 days later I still have no brackets! Also none of this is recorded as a dor, so no extra payment from Hillary's, however I will lose commission because of further discounts trying to keep the customer happy.
The sad and most annoying aspect of this whole saga is this is not a one off. Every week there's another problem caused by shockingly poor quality control. After six months with the company the situation is getting worse not better. No one seems to care enough to get to grips with this.They must be losing millions per annum because of crap workmanship and poor customer service. This we know is not the only issue affecting Hillarys. There are many and varied .After time you just get fed up with dealing with all this crap. It wears you out. My view is the company is in bad shape and unless we get a miracle I'll be leaving at the first opportunity.
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Post by RED on May 7, 2006 13:44:10 GMT 1
Customer ordered pvc blind and a curved headrail.Explained lead time would take 3 weeks because pvc is made in Belgium.No problem. Three weeks later the Louvre's from Belgium are delivered as are the Louvre's for the curved but no sign of the headrails.Customer is informed and a new fit date arranged for the following week. Headrails finally arrive.Pvc is fine, however wrong top fix brackets are sent for the curved rail. Search high and low for spares but don't have enough to finish the Job.(only 2nd curved in six months of doing the Job) Customer p...off but service centre promise delivery next day. Next day package arrives, however they have packed the wrong brackets again! Customer really p... off now, thankfully her anger is directed at the company for it's poor back up. She is assured by hillary's she will be compensated for the delays and that I will be contacted and the brackets delivered the following day. In the meantime after trying to get through to the service centre three times, each involving a wait of 20 +mins on the phone, I finally get to file my complaint. The result is 4 days later I still have no brackets! Also none of this is recorded as a dor, so no extra payment from Hillary's, however I will lose commission because of further discounts trying to keep the customer happy. The sad and most annoying aspect of this whole saga is this is not a one off. Every week there's another problem caused by shockingly poor quality control. After six months with the company the situation is getting worse not better. No one seems to care enough to get to grips with this.They must be losing millions per annum because of crap workmanship and poor customer service. This we know is not the only issue affecting Hillarys. There are many and varied .After time you just get fed up with dealing with all this crap. It wears you out. My view is the company is in bad shape and unless we get a miracle I'll be leaving at the first opportunity. Thats one of the problems with Hillary's now, they are too busy trying to run us instead of doing what they should be doing. As one very high up manager once said to me, " we leave you to run your agency as you feel fit and this allows us to do what we do best. Make blinds". That was said to me around 8 years ago. Now look where we are since they abandoned this principle. Red |
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Post by RED on May 7, 2006 13:49:03 GMT 1
Heres an interesting fact.
Take any one week and work out the average order value per self gen lead and the same for diary booked lead, you will find that lead to sale is somewhere around 85% for self gen leads and around 50% for diary booked leads.
Also average order value per self gen lead is far higher than diary booked leads.
For instance last week my self gen leads totaled around 3500 pounds and diary leads totaled around 1500 pounds with far more leads.
Is there a moral here?
Red
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Post by dibsdobs on May 7, 2006 16:39:55 GMT 1
Red said Thats one of the problems with Hillary's now, they are too busy trying to run us instead of doing what they should be doing. As one very high up manager once said to me, " we leave you to run your agency as you feel fit and this allows us to do what we do best. Make blinds".
That was said to me around 8 years ago. Now look where we are since they abandoned this principle.
Red Many of our/ Hillary's competitors have adopted this very successful principle, largely copied from Hillary's original format. There has been in the last few years an upsurge of such competitors, who it seems are doing very well. Both in the business sense and the general well being of their partners/advisers etc. In fact, if like me you look into this, you find their general ethos, completely at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to Hillary's. Possibly why so many of us have left, and found success elsewhere. Hillary's internal housekeeping and management skills must be such that the company, in my estimation has reached an all time low. In its product quality, in its quality control, in its management , in its repeated failure to lift an increasingly despondent workforce. Its complete lack of ability to produce effective, coherent communication. Communication that does more harm to an already shaky relationship. Its complete failure to take off the blinkers and resolve the wooden blind issue. Cut backs being made in the wrong areas having serious detrimental effects on all the above. In fact it seems to me, an altogether shortsightedness that is tearing away at the heart, of all the key values Hillary's used to have. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we sell the company!Those of us that are here now, and perhaps will be when the next wave of owners/directives and "buzz" words come in. Should be proud of the fact that we are the ones that have made this company what it is,......or should I say was? As many of the consistently conscientious advisers' patience begins to wain and they disappear to hopefully sunnier climes, all that will be left, will be the blissfully ignorant, second rate advisers, who will soak up the "Hillary's way!" Which is what they want anyway it seems. The sense of the old adage "you get what you pay for" has now been lost to Hillary's, who consistently supply the customer with a product worthy of less than they paid for it. Simply to pay for excess management and bad management. Now we are expected to give a level of service worthy of higher reward,for less. You can not just say you are the best, without being the best! There is an argument that the commitment to these other companies, financial or otherwise, by an adviser is much greater, but it is a fact that the rewards are much higher also. I think it is a great shame that it seems Hillary's have lost the plot. All well meaning high ideals, and great rhetoric, that never seems to amount to much. For instance, Hillary's always seem to hold Thomas Sanderson up as a company who's formula is one to be emulated. We are all encouraged to adopt their "more professional approach". I don't have a problem with this, but always feel let down by Hillary's. Take the recent awnings/roof training meetings. The level of knowledge imparted was very average, none of the promised "tools" to help attain the order or fill up 1 1/2 hours worth of sales call ever materialized. Many advisers had major issues with the product which were never resolved, and the promises of " I'll find out and get back to you " turned out to be empty. This amounts to an ill prepared sales force, with few tools,skills, and low confidence, both in product and in the level of response/service they will get from Hillary's. Any success achieved under these circumstances, is mainly due to the quality of the adviser. Something drastic and monumental needs to happen to change things. Lets hope its a positive directive from Hillary's, backed up by action! As opposed to a rush or ex-advisers coming on here and telling us how we could all do ourselves a favour! |
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Post by hereticus on May 7, 2006 17:24:21 GMT 1
Red / Dibsdobs....I find myself agreeing completely with virtually everything you say in this posting. Oh, for the good old days when we were left to be effective sales people and Hillarys were there to supply us and support us.
I think part of the problem is that in their efforts to improve the poorer advisors performance they tried to establish a 'one size fits all' Hillarys way of doing things which, inevitably, was a levelling down and made it more difficult for the better advisors to perform at their best and gain satisfaction in their work.
Some advisors will never make the grade no matter how much support and training they get, whereas some of us can just get on with it and turn in good results without interference and without the imposition of standard practices.
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Post by golfsthegame on May 7, 2006 18:44:24 GMT 1
Well said disbobs I too find your analysis spot on.
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reginald
Junior Member
agent 27 years
Posts: 70
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Post by reginald on May 7, 2006 19:56:35 GMT 1
Disbobs you are spot on yet again. When sillarys started this central lead gathering and diary booking I told my then FSM that all they were doing was bringing the good agents down to the poor agents level ,not vice versa. I was told that this was the way forward and that I was "a bit of a dinosaur" God help us but please bring back the bloody dino,s
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Post by hereticus on May 8, 2006 19:03:16 GMT 1
If you have read this thread from the beginning you will remember that I kicked it off with my story of three missing platinum venetians which took four weeks to make, missed the van, and then missed the special carrier. When I posted my story I thought everything was finally sorted and that they would arrive by carrier on Saturday morning as promised.
Did they heck ! Not today either !
So far I have broken two fitting appointments, lost about four hours work, had to cancel availability equivalent to four sales opportunities in order to re-schedule fitting, and spent a total of about two hours on the phone trying to get the matter resolved.
How much worse can things get ?
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Post by hereticus on May 9, 2006 9:24:59 GMT 1
And the saga continues !
Carrier arrived at 8.20 this morning, but with only two of the three blinds !!!!!!!
Words escape me.
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Post by dibsdobs on May 9, 2006 22:48:21 GMT 1
Hereticus, I've been monitoring your posts and detected a worrying trend to wards the negative! Is everything ok?  |
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Post by hereticus on May 10, 2006 7:16:50 GMT 1
Hereticus, I've been monitoring your posts and detected a worrying trend to wards the negative! Is everything ok? Thanks for your concern, Dibsdobs. I remain generally optimistic about the future - somebody has got to - but I am now with the view that too little has changed, too slowly, and without effective consultation. I still think that the seminars worked well, that the company understand most of our problems, and that some within the company are motivated towards change, but so far there is little real evidence of progress. In the meantime, there are certain specific things that really do p**s me off, thus a run of more negative postings. |
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Post by phugly on May 10, 2006 8:44:39 GMT 1
There seems to be an increase in the number of orders not being delivered in time, but not only this, blinds being delivered by carrier are arriving in sh*t condition. Had three venetians delivered this week, two of which looked as though they had been run over by a truck and were in no condition to be fitted and the third had the carton broken in half with 3ft of control rod sticking out the end. Usually the blinds are well packaged for the carrier but lateley they seem to be just sent as is. Another thing that really annoys me is that orders sent by carrier have no invoices with them and trying to get replacement invoices is next to impossible. You cant leave a business customer with a hand written reciept for tax cos IR will not accept it
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