This level of care and attention to detail has been crafted very intentionally since our “garage days”. In fact, Brian used to hand write and wax seal a separate letter in every package when we first started out! In order to accommodate our growth, he switched to handwriting a thank you message directly on each packing slip. Of course, Brian couldn’t sustain this task by himself as we grew, so he invited others on the team to help. Today, the handwritten notes continue on and are written by our Customer Care team. They spend a good portion of their day signing your packing slips as a way of living out our value Express Gratitude. It’s quite a commitment to keep this up. It’s about the equivalent of one full-time role just to do these thank you notes!
As we’ve continued to grow and approached the 2016 holiday season, our busiest time of year, it was important for us to evaluate the practicality and sustainability of our handwritten notes. It’s a personal touch that we want to continue as long as we feasibly can! We’ve come to realize that signing the packing slip itself is making it difficult to scale our shipping process while maintaining the high level of speed and accuracy our customers have come to expect.
Normally when we process your order after you place it on our site, we print out the packing slip, sign the thank you note, and then it’s ready to go to our Fulfillment Team to pull, pack, and ship your goodies. The big logistical challenge for us has been that we work Monday-Friday, though our site is open 24/7. That means early in the week, we’re playing catch-up -- not just on orders, but with email, voicemail, Live Chat, social media, etc. The handwritten notes as we do them now have become a bottleneck, consuming our Customer Care team’s time from responding to you from over the weekend, and holding up preparation for your orders to be fulfilled by our Fulfillment Team. It’s all been with the best of intentions, but it’s bogged things down for us for some time now.
With all this in mind, we came up with a solution that we believe will allow us to include the best of what these notes offer while still providing a quick turnaround time for fulfilling your orders.
Effective immediately, instead of signing the packing slips as we print them, we'll be signing newly designed postcards that will be included with your order. Each card is designed with care by our talented Media Team and features prints of some of our past Monday Matchup art. They are printed on fountain pen friendly cardstock so you can see how nice the inks we use can look. We tested over 30 types of paper just to be able to find the right one!
There will be a host of other benefits to this change, as well. By physically separating our thank you notes from the packing slip itself, it will allow our Customer Care team to focus on responding to your emails, phone calls, and Live Chats even faster. They will be able to write these notes during slower times (like afternoons and towards the end of the week) so that when we’re in crunch-time, there won’t be a bottleneck in fulfilling your orders. And as a benefit for all our team, since these notes won’t be restricted to an order-in-process, other members of our team across the company can write thank you cards to be included with your order! This will be a huge morale booster for them to be able to participate in this expression of gratitude, and you’ll get introduced to other members of our team.
We know that any change to something we’ve been doing for seven years can feel like a big deal. We’ve given it a ton of thought and we truly believe that this is going to be beneficial to both our team and to you as our customers.
What do you think of our new thank you cards? Have any ideas for designs? Leave them in the comments below!
Write on,
Brian & The Goulet Pen Company Team