The way our system works is that when we receive an order, the customer makes a pre-payment via PayPal at the time of submitting their Order Form. Then we design a sample of the label, put it onto a dedicated web page, and email the customer to view the sample. Here they can check that everything is okay, inform us of any amendents they would like, then if they are happy with the design they email us with their approval to do the printing process.
This is the point where we were having problems with customers who had Hotmail accounts. Several days would go by without us hearing from them. We sent follow-up emails but still got no response. If they provided a phone number we would ring them, otherwise we had to send them a letter. The responses we were getting back in every case were that they had not received any emails from us at all.
Apart from the frustration of adding extra time to get the orders completed, it was making us look bad. We knew our ordering system was working correctly because we were receiving orders from other customers around the same time who were using other email accounts, without any problems at all. Our average turn-around from ordering to despatch was 1 to 2 days, depending how quickly the customer gives their approval. We didn't want to jeopardise this time-frame.
We never discovered what was actually causing this problem with Hotmail. We thought that maybe the customers had set up their spam filters in their email software too aggressively, and our emails were being rejected, but for so many similar problems with different people didn't seem a likely reason.
Anyway, we couldn't afford to have these re-curring problems so made the decision to block Hotmail accounts completely.
Since we did this, we have noticed that some of these customers have returned to us but give us an altenative email address to use, which makes the whole process go through very smoothly.
Thanks George for plugging that link for us, much appreciated.
Laurie.
