You might have read our recent blog about highlighting some of the amazing ways that our Customer Happiness team have gone above and beyond to help our customers. But the team doesn’t just go the extra mile by solving problems and getting books delivered to every corner of the Earth.
They’re also in charge of a piggy bank’s worth of money that we call the Fantastic Fund. It exists because we want to spend less money on paying for Facebook advertising and more money on making our customers smile.
The Customer Happiness team use the Fantastic Fund whenever they spot a chance to do something a little bit special for one of our customers. Here are a few of my favourite stories from the Fantastic Fund so far.
Pampering the brokenhearted
Loads of people like to take their time when making one of our books for their best friends, so that they can include all of their favourite memories, messages and photos to make a gift that’s truly personal.
But sometimes whilst they are making their books, life gets in the way and things change.
That’s exactly what had happened when we received a call from a customer saying that the books she’d recently ordered for her friend included a picture of the intended recipient with her then fiancé. Sadly, they’d recently split up and our customer wondered if we could reproduce the book without the photo.
We were only too happy to help of course. We decided though, that in the circumstances we could do a little more too. So Customer Happiness dipped into the Fantastic Fund and made sure that along with the reprinted book we sent a fancy pamper hamper of chocolates and bubbly to help our customer support her friend through her heartache.
Wine-ing on Facebook
From the sincere to the silly now, with the story of what happens when one Australian woman drinks a glass of wine or two too many and decides to give a company she’s never heard of some constructive “feedback”.
Doing my usual morning check of our social media I noticed that we’d been left a fairly scathing comment on one of our posts. I checked in with the Customer Happiness team and we’d never had a customer or a book made with that name. We’re genuinely always keen to hear about how people think we can make our books even better, so I replied to the comment asking for more details. After a few hours of radio silence we received a reply offering a very sheepish apology for what turned out to be the result of an out of the blue, slightly drunken, misadventure on Facebook.
Quick as a flash, the Customer Happiness team spotted a chance to put the Fantastic Fund to good use. In no time at all a copy of our brand new Wise(ish) Words for Wine Lovers was on its way to our new Australian friend. And she loved it, even our tongue in cheek personal message about the dangers of mixing merlot with social media…
Doggy decoys
Man’s best friend isn’t necessarily a book’s best buddy. We discovered this when we were emailed by a gentleman who had made his dad a book for Christmas.
He’d had fun using the book builder to personalise the book and it had arrived safe and sound with him in the post well ahead of Christmas Day. He was getting ready to wrap his family’s presents when disaster struck. His dog had sniffed out his dad’s book and decided it looked tasty!
Clearly the hungry hound was feeling left out. So when we sent out the replacement book Customer Happiness used the Fantastic Fund to send out a special Christmas stocking stuffed with treats and toys for the dog to sink his teeth into.
You might not be able to teach an old dog new tricks. But thanks to the Fantastic Fund our Customer Happiness team can certainly make sure a dog is distracted whilst you wrap some presents. Or that a moment of wine-inspired bad temper can end in a bookful of laughs. And that a best friend can help to mend a broken heart.
