We survived our first Holiday Season!!! And guess what, it was SO fun, SO busy, SO successful and SO stressful all at once. We are so grateful, exhausted and happy. Thank you to all who ordered from us this holiday season – we hope you and the recipients of the gifts enjoy the products.
Customer Service is extremely important to us. We don’t mark an order complete unless the courier has confirmed it is delivered.
In the GTA we use a local delivery service that makes sure the recipient is home or contacts them by phone if there is no answer at the door (this is why it’s so important to leave the recipient’s phone number and not the senders). This delivery service also delivers next day and while they got very busy in December gifts sent with this service didn’t get lost or stuck in any backlogs like those sent with other major shipping companies.
For non-GTA shipments we used couriers such as ICS, Canpar, UPS, Fedex and Dicom. We only use Canada Post for PO Boxes or extremely remote shipments. We found non-GTA deliveries more of a challenge especially if anything was wrong with the address or there was no buzzer number. Although these carriers request a phone number, it’s clear they don’t use it if there’s a delivery issue and they are backed up. We also found these carriers were extremely backed up due to unprecedented volumes this year because of COVID-19 and the various lockdowns in place in December.
Out of over 1000 orders we had a total of 5 orders not received before Christmas – 1 got lost, 1 got delivered to a neighbour by accident, 1 needed an address correction and 2 were ordered too late to arrive ontime. Other packages were delayed but we kept our customers were informed on the delivery status throughout the whole process. Tracking these orders and communicating about the delays is not the standard for online shops but it’s something we feel is important.
We saw this article on BlogTO about another well established company who did not meet their delivery commitments and that sort of publicity in the gift basket industry is never good, even when it’s about a competing shop. (Note: the article in question is about Hazeltons who has countless bad reviews on all platforms but due to their size continue to receive orders).
We wanted to set the record straight about Caribou Gifts. We really do Caribou you!
We do things differently.
We work hard to create an exceptional customer experience.
You can count on Caribou Gifts for your gift giving.
