Big issues with LTT Store and Customer Support that must be addressed immediately

[aresthefierce]

@LinusTech @nicklmg As a big fan of the channel this subject pains me. However there clearly seems to be a large issue or issues with LTT Store and Customer support. I want to preface that A. I understand there are other posts about the customer support issues however I'm genuinely trying to offer some ideas of how to fix the problems. B. I understand they are in the middle of large drops of the backpack and screw driver, on top of that we are approaching the holidays. These things understandably would create some delays.

That being said I believe the way they are currently going about handling these things is unacceptable and leaving many people unsatisfied. If you do any quick looks around the forum you'll see there are many people who can't get a response from customer service, myself included. People feel that the website has not given them accurate information regarding the delays that can be expected. Many people are getting tracking info sent to them only for the order to sit for over a week without being picked up by the shipping company.

I'm seeing all these issues and I can't help but feel that the entire store is being mismanaged and it is woefully understaffed. There are some fairly basic steps to take to resolve these issues. However it seems that so far the only one that I've seen addressed is that they have hired more customer support staff to hopefully get through their customer support tickets. Unless there are some other things going on behind the scenes that we're not kept apprise of, which very well may be the case however maybe letting the community/customers in on these changes may help alleviate some issues.

 

Before I go further I just want to share my experience.

I ordered a desk pad on 11/5/2022. I want to point out that I didn't order a backpack or a screw driver which I'm assuming are the products primarily creating the issues. I was sent an email stating my order was on the way with tracking information on 11/6/2022. It's now 11/18/2022 and as far as I can tell from tracking info provided my order has not shipped yet. 

 

I've reached out to customer support a few days ago with no reply as well as many others I've noticed on the forum. I did notice hey put the banner on the store staying that they have a lot of tickets so bear with them while they get through the tickets.

 

Honestly I'm not in that big of a rush for a desk pad, Its not like my life depends on it or anything remotely close to that level of need. I think most of us are in that same boat with our orders, these are all things we want, not things we need (there are likely some people with pressure to get it by the holidays but if its a little late its not the end of the world).

But, does that make these issues something that should go unaddressed? I don't think so. These experiences will leave a bad taste in people's mouths. It will leave people debating whether or not this a company that is trustworthy. It will certainly make people think, "Should I really buy something again from LTT store after what happened last time?". It is out of my love of LTT that I write this. And maybe you guys already know these things and are working on them, if that's the case wonderful, if not maybe take these into consideration.

 

I could be wrong but the primary issue to me seem to be they are in the habit of creating shipping labels way before the item is going to be shipped. This should be done the same day the order will be picked up or at a minimum the day beforehand (weekends being the exception). They are likely generating a customer support ticket for themselves every time that a tracking number is given and then the order doesn't ship for multiple days. I'm sure I'm not alone when I get a tracking number for an order and then I see that my order has not made any progress in 3-4 business days I assume my order got lost. Even if let's say 75% of people who this happens to generate a customer support ticket they would currently have somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,250 support tickets from each wave of the 15,000 screw driver drops. That is generating a lot of work for the customer support team that is easily avoidable by simply not sending a "Your order has shipped email" when the order hasn't shipped. There are likely other areas like this where you are generating a lot of customer support tickets regarding the same thing, find a solution to these thing that prevents you from getting support tickets in the first place.

 

The second biggest issue is the absolute failure of customer support to reach out in a timely manner. Communication with your customer is one of the most important aspects of business and right now there is effectively zero communication from LTT STORE about the issues at hand. This will hopefully be resolved by doubling the staff of the customer support team. However like I said you should be approaching this from how do we reduce the number of tickets we are getting first and foremost. Second you should be running metrics on how many tickets are being generated a day and how many are each member of your staff able to address per day and looking at how many people it would take to address every ticket within 24-48 hours of receiving it. 48 hours should be the absolute minimum standard. Beyond that is just unacceptable. Especially given that the only method of contacting support is via email. Your customers are feeling ignored, unheard, and powerless. Third you should be offering live chat at a minimum in addition to email especially since you use ZenDesk which has live chat built in. You may need to do things like hire temps during the holidays as you likely don't need the same number of customer support staff though the rest of the year as you do around peak season. Or even take people who might be working for you in another capacity and have them assist with customer support tickets if they have the ability to help. Fourth you should be doing something like a newsletter post to outline to your customers what's currently going on and why people don't have their orders will help. A little bit of communication can go a long way. Even just telling us how many support tickets you have and where in line we are will help people have an expectation of how long it will take you to get back to them. 

Another issue I've seen is that customer support seems to have information that should have been on the website to begin with. In one thread I saw someone ordered the black shaft screwdriver which the website only says "Units with the black shaft may delay beyond these dates as those are limited run & built to order. " and customer support told the person that black shafts will increase shipping time by 3-4 weeks. If that is the case put that statement on the website. Set an expectation for your customer. This is a basic fundamental of sales, setting expectations. Keep in mind you could literally set your expectations however you want, you could tell people its going to be 6 weeks and then when they get it at 3 weeks they will be so excited that it came in early. This also will eliminate many of your customer support tickets as I'm sure every time that someone bought a screwdriver where the website says wave one ships by X date and they don't see that their order has shipped by then you get another support ticket. A super basic sales fundamental of under promise and over deliver is being completely ignored here.

 

 

You're likely setting yourself up for failure by trying to get products into everyone's hands as soon as possible if you take a look at your wave schedule for the screw drivers I feel you're probably biting off more than you can chew. On the screwdriver specifically you are trying to ship 15,000 orders every 10 days roughly. Assuming you are working 5 days a week that is 1,500 orders per day on the screw driver alone. I used to work in shipping at a place that did 800 orders every business day of the entire year. We had a team of about 12-15 people who handled the packaging, attaching shipping labels, and everything else needed to get those orders out the door every day. I would be surprised if you had anywhere near that amount of staff working in your shipping department. You should be either trying to bring the team up to a size that can actually handle shipping this much volume or not set yourself up for failure by reducing the amount of product your are selling on a deadline.  

 

The TLDR;

• Only send tracking info once it's been picked up by the shipping company.
• Find ways to reduce customer support tickets. Find the issues that come up the most in support tickets and then find ways to address these in a way that eliminate as many support tickets from coming in as possible. 
• Change your website's language around delays and shipping expectations to more closely match what the reality of the situation is. If its gonna take 3-4 weeks longer for a black shaft don't say "it may delay" say its gonna take 5-8 weeks.
• Under promise over deliver 
• Communicate with your customers, don't let a customer go more than 48 hours without a response, tell us how many people are in line for support before us, give us an estimate time for getting a response
• Set up live chat and hire additional staff for this
• Analyze the metrics, find out what your team is capable of accomplishing and hire additional support as needed
• Write up a newsletter explaining the situation
• Don't set your team up for failure trying to ship crazy amounts of product without the staff to do so or the staff to provide support for those orders

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Alex T88]

@aresthefierce This is exceptional ! The time, thought and effort that you put into it is simply amazing ! Really hope that LTT takes into consideration your suggestions and insights, which are basically the solution to the many problems that the company is currently dealing with at least regarding the merchandise aspect of it ! Thank you !

[handro]

Agree that it seems they have bit off more than they can chew right now, and some sort of weekly newsletter or update with what is going on would be helpful. 

 

I ordered 2 Blank T-Shirts the day they were announced and it's now almost 3 weeks later still in "Label Created" status. There is some explanation on Twitter that the status means they handed the package off to their shipping partner Wizmo and it's in their hands now. Still 3 weeks seems like too long and makes me think the package was lost. Also my Black Shaft screwdriver is in the same state after having "shipped" this week 11/14. So we'll see how long it gets stuck in the Wizmo purgatory.   

 

My Blank T-Shirt order for reference, screenshot from just now: 

 

Edited November 18, 2022 by handro
added tweets

[aresthefierce]

Ah, so at least that might explain what's going on with my order. I'm not on twitter. A much better place for that information would be on their newsletter or a post on the forum etc. 

That makes me wonder why they use a shipping partner like Wizmo rather than just have UPS/Fedex come pick it up from their warehouse?

 

Maybe they need a FAQ about shipping page which explains things like this? That would also cut down on support tickets. 

[handro]

I agree. We shouldn't have to go searching through Twitter replies to get the latest info. And not everyone will watch a 2+ hour WAN show for updates somewhere in the middle. 

 

p.s. I like the long WAN shows and the behind the scenes info, but they also advertise merch every other video and not everyone will be up to date with the latest WAN happenings. 

[nicklmg]

Thanks for your detailed feedback. I've read your whole post but will reply to the TL;DR just to save space here.

2 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Only send tracking info once it's been picked up by the shipping company.

I'll give this suggestion directly to the distribution team, but I'm honestly not sure if this is feasible... My understanding is that the info call from Shopify lines up with label creation, and I don't think there's a way to reliably adjust that (given that we use a number of different carriers), if it's even possible without pretty significant adjustment.

 

One thing we can definitely work on fixing is time from label creation to shipment. I know our distribution team has been pre-printing quite significantly to allow for easier sorting & picking, but this is certainly causing more frustration for customers when they get that exciting notification then see no updates for a week or more. We've asked them to cut down on pre-printing, so I'm hopeful that we can overcome that part of it moving forward. This is even more important due to the upcoming holiday season, where we always see delays for inbound shipments at carriers, which also wind up in that nebulous "label created" phase.

 

I've asked Wizmo for greater detail on these pre-carrier stages in the past, and I've bumped that request up again with them just now. If we can add a few more phases like "departed distribution facility," "at sorting facility," "on way to carrier" etc. I think that will go a long way for transparency of information here.

2 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Find ways to reduce customer support tickets. Find the issues that come up the most in support tickets and then find ways to address these in a way that eliminate as many support tickets from coming in as possible. 

Something we're always working on. Unfortunately many of the highest impact tickets - which wind up being most time consuming - are unavoidable with recent circumstances eg. doublecharging EU VAT. We've been chasing our partners for over a year to resolve the issues we've seen with EU VAT being assessed improperly on a lot of our shipments, and we're FINALLY starting to see some of these problems get a resolution... but unfortunately that doesn't help the backlog that has that VAT assessed improperly, leading to thousands of adjustments being made once the shipment arrives with the customer.

 

We're improving our automations & bulk replies, though those obviously miss the mark in some cases, and we'll be moving over to a new support system in the coming months which will give us more direct control and access to lower reply times. It's been a long time coming, and something we wish we would've done earlier.

 

Also adding a few more roles to that team to work on more throughput and overall process improvement.

2 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Change your website's language around delays and shipping expectations to more closely match what the reality of the situation is. If its gonna take 3-4 weeks longer for a black shaft don't say "it may delay" say its gonna take 5-8 weeks.

Thx for catching that, we have updated the language on the store page. It's always challenging to make those projections well in advance (hence the issues with backpack shipping dates), the 3-4 week timeline was only locked in about a week ago, and even then we've taken a bit longer to ship black shaft wave 1 than expected... so it's always a moving target, unfortunately.

2 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Under promise over deliver 

That is the goal, and is why we didn't provide a firm expected date range for the black shaft to begin with - could've taken 3-4 weeks, or 3-4 months. It all depended on what happened once bulk production begun, and whether we were able to meet or beat our projected dates for production on screwdrivers overall.

 

We did have some production delays with silvers, and we weren't able to reach the max output that was expected before we started production, but since we underpromised on those shipping dates we did match or beat wave 1, 2, and 3 ship dates for silver shafts in 98% of cases.

2 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Communicate with your customers, don't let a customer go more than 48 hours without a response, tell us how many people are in line for support before us, give us an estimate time for getting a response

That is the goal. We had basically recovered from the initial launch wave of tickets up until last week, when we started seeing 4-6x our normal daily inbound tickets - partially due to some of the concerns you've outlined here with labels being printed too early and updates not coming soon enough, as well as a number of other factors with shipping and import issues.

 

We're making adjustments that we can - we've reassigned a few more people to that team, made offers to a number of temporary employees that we've engaged with in the past, and added a few additional roles to the hiring board. Unfortunately we aren't as nimble as we need to be, and that's something that will be top of the list for improvement moving forward.

 

I'll see what can be done about a place in line or reply estimate, especially something automated. I expect we'll be able to provide something like that in the future, I'm just not sure how quickly we can get it together to ensure that it's done in an accurate and up-to-date way.

3 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Set up live chat and hire additional staff for this

We may explore live chat in the future, we are adding additional staff but our only priority right now is getting reply times down to 24 hours or less.

3 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Analyze the metrics, find out what your team is capable of accomplishing and hire additional support as needed

Already in progress.

3 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Write up a newsletter explaining the situation

I'll give this some thought and try to sort out what type of update makes sense here. Public post probably makes more sense than a newsletter email, but will work on something.

3 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

• Don't set your team up for failure trying to ship crazy amounts of product without the staff to do so or the staff to provide support for those orders

We absolutely should have had more support staff ready to go, that's 100% a failure on my part. Scaling can be tough, and we're learning a lot along the way, but there is a lot that I could and should have done better in this case.

 

We have doubled our support staff (with 2 more additions happening imminently), and I believe our distributor as almost doubled their daily staff as well during this period.

 

Couple more points:

3 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

You're likely setting yourself up for failure by trying to get products into everyone's hands as soon as possible if you take a look at your wave schedule for the screw drivers I feel you're probably biting off more than you can chew. On the screwdriver specifically you are trying to ship 15,000 orders every 10 days roughly. Assuming you are working 5 days a week that is 1,500 orders per day on the screw driver alone. I used to work in shipping at a place that did 800 orders every business day of the entire year. We had a team of about 12-15 people who handled the packaging, attaching shipping labels, and everything else needed to get those orders out the door every day. I would be surprised if you had anywhere near that amount of staff working in your shipping department. You should be either trying to bring the team up to a size that can actually handle shipping this much volume or not set yourself up for failure by reducing the amount of product your are selling on a deadline.

Our team is shipping 2,000 orders per day with a team of ~15 right now. We've made some mistakes, but we have stuck to our proposed schedule for shipping silver shaft drivers. We knew we'd be capable of doing that, and we have. As mentioned above, we're making mistakes with pre-printing some labels too early, but we've met or beat those shipping date estimates in about 98% of cases.

56 minutes ago, aresthefierce said:

Ah, so at least that might explain what's going on with my order. I'm not on twitter. A much better place for that information would be on their newsletter or a post on the forum etc. 

That makes me wonder why they use a shipping partner like Wizmo rather than just have UPS/Fedex come pick it up from their warehouse?

 

Maybe they need a FAQ about shipping page which explains things like this? That would also cut down on support tickets. 

A post on the forum would have similar limitations, but I definitely should be doing a better job of keeping info up to date on the site.

 

We utilize Wizmo because the biggest complaint we had from customers for years was the cost of our shipping (since we show real rates, while many brands effectively hide the "real" cost of their shipping in inflated product pricing). The only negotiating power you get with carriers is scale, so the way to improve on that major customer complaint was to find an aggregator, and Wizmo came very highly recommended from some close & trusted partners. And to be fair to them, they've been an awesome partner for us as well.

 

The issue right now is that our recent growth has even broken some of their processes... we went from a max # of orders of like 25,000 in a month previously to almost 100,000 (obviously shipping less than that per month). Our latest invoices have literally broken Wizmo's templates, with some digits half-hidden because the total value doesn't even fit in their "TOTAL" cell lol.

 

The last few months have been unprecedented for us, our distributor, and our carrier. We're all doing our best to make improvements, but I totally agree that we haven't done enough.

 

 

 

Again, I really appreciate the feedback, and we're working on most of the points you brought up here. I know I've done a poor job of executing on a lot of what we've experienced in the last few months, but all I can say is that we're learning lessons and trying to get things back on track to provide an excellent experience to everyone who buys with us.

[aresthefierce]

@nicklmgI sincerely appreciate the detailed reply. I kinda figured you guys would be working on most of the points I made because I genuinely get the impression from all of the staff, that you guys care about delivering what you've promised. But looking around I had really only seen we've doubled the CS staff and not nearly as much transparency as you've given in your reply, I very much appreciate it. I wasn't aware of the VAT problem you guys have been experiencing and I can only imagine how frustrating that must be. I'm a little surprised you guys have decided to keep shipping to EU given the headache it causes you but I respect keeping it going as well. 

I guess one thing to keep in mind is you guys have a good problem going on right now which is demand is high for your merch/products. And hopefully this period of growth allows you guys to be more prepared and ready in the future for your next projects whatever they may be. So while it probably sucks dealing with it right now you'll only be better for it in the long run.

 

Thank you again for your reply.

 

[nicklmg]

2 hours ago, aresthefierce said:

@nicklmgI sincerely appreciate the detailed reply. I kinda figured you guys would be working on most of the points I made because I genuinely get the impression from all of the staff, that you guys care about delivering what you've promised. But looking around I had really only seen we've doubled the CS staff and not nearly as much transparency as you've given in your reply, I very much appreciate it. I wasn't aware of the VAT problem you guys have been experiencing and I can only imagine how frustrating that must be. I'm a little surprised you guys have decided to keep shipping to EU given the headache it causes you but I respect keeping it going as well. 

I guess one thing to keep in mind is you guys have a good problem going on right now which is demand is high for your merch/products. And hopefully this period of growth allows you guys to be more prepared and ready in the future for your next projects whatever they may be. So while it probably sucks dealing with it right now you'll only be better for it in the long run.

 

Thank you again for your reply.

 

I mean, the EU is like 30% of our audience or something haha. So it would really suck to not serve them  even if there are some headaches from time to time.

 

Posts like yours help us improve, so thank you. We're definitely on the right path, but it's clear I need to do more to enable our team for success. We'll get there.

 

And yes, always helps that our problem is "we have too many orders." Certainly better than having a warehouse full of 100,000 unsold screwdrivers 

[Just that Mario]

You guys do realise that all the notifications and shipment updates are automated? "label is printed" is just the first step in the process. It means literally that the package was registered, label was printed for it and now it is waiting for the actual delivery company to show up and pick it up. Often enough they don't come until certain threshold is met. Grown up people placing orders on or during a new hot release during upcoming holiday season and completely surprised when shipping is delayed?

I've ordered from LTTStore and had to contact the support and it for sure isn't as bad as you make it to be. It seems that you're just blaming LTTStore for your own impatience.

[handro]

10 hours ago, Just that Mario said:

You guys do realise that all the notifications and shipment updates are automated? "label is printed" is just the first step in the process. It means literally that the package was registered, label was printed for it and now it is waiting for the actual delivery company to show up and pick it up. Often enough they don't come until certain threshold is met. Grown up people placing orders on or during a new hot release during upcoming holiday season and completely surprised when shipping is delayed?

I've ordered from LTTStore and had to contact the support and it for sure isn't as bad as you make it to be. It seems that you're just blaming LTTStore for your own impatience.

 

Yes its automated, but you do realise that Nick just explained above how "label is printed" even before the items are picked off the shelf and boxed up? And how their distribution team has been printing more labels than they can get to in a day. There is no package yet for anyone to pick up. Based on the info shared it's probably not an issue of "waiting for a certain threshold of boxes to pick up" and more likely "there are too many boxes going out to fit in this truck".

 

Yes the people that are posting before they even get a tracking number asking for an update or don't read the item description to understand that black shaft drivers have a delay are a bit impatient.

 

But for their regular in stock items (desk pad and t-shirts in this case) and 2-3 weeks after getting a tracking number but still not moving, then yeah it's worth reaching out to support or seeing what the delay is.

[Valk9005]

On 11/18/2022 at 3:22 PM, nicklmg said:

Thanks for your detailed feedback. I've read your whole post but will reply to the TL;DR just to save space here.

I'll give this suggestion directly to the distribution team, but I'm honestly not sure if this is feasible... My understanding is that the info call from Shopify lines up with label creation, and I don't think there's a way to reliably adjust that (given that we use a number of different carriers), if it's even possible without pretty significant adjustment.

 

One thing we can definitely work on fixing is time from label creation to shipment. I know our distribution team has been pre-printing quite significantly to allow for easier sorting & picking, but this is certainly causing more frustration for customers when they get that exciting notification then see no updates for a week or more. We've asked them to cut down on pre-printing, so I'm hopeful that we can overcome that part of it moving forward. This is even more important due to the upcoming holiday season, where we always see delays for inbound shipments at carriers, which also wind up in that nebulous "label created" phase.

 

I've asked Wizmo for greater detail on these pre-carrier stages in the past, and I've bumped that request up again with them just now. If we can add a few more phases like "departed distribution facility," "at sorting facility," "on way to carrier" etc. I think that will go a long way for transparency of information here.

Something we're always working on. Unfortunately many of the highest impact tickets - which wind up being most time consuming - are unavoidable with recent circumstances eg. doublecharging EU VAT. We've been chasing our partners for over a year to resolve the issues we've seen with EU VAT being assessed improperly on a lot of our shipments, and we're FINALLY starting to see some of these problems get a resolution... but unfortunately that doesn't help the backlog that has that VAT assessed improperly, leading to thousands of adjustments being made once the shipment arrives with the customer.

 

We're improving our automations & bulk replies, though those obviously miss the mark in some cases, and we'll be moving over to a new support system in the coming months which will give us more direct control and access to lower reply times. It's been a long time coming, and something we wish we would've done earlier.

 

Also adding a few more roles to that team to work on more throughput and overall process improvement.

Thx for catching that, we have updated the language on the store page. It's always challenging to make those projections well in advance (hence the issues with backpack shipping dates), the 3-4 week timeline was only locked in about a week ago, and even then we've taken a bit longer to ship black shaft wave 1 than expected... so it's always a moving target, unfortunately.

That is the goal, and is why we didn't provide a firm expected date range for the black shaft to begin with - could've taken 3-4 weeks, or 3-4 months. It all depended on what happened once bulk production begun, and whether we were able to meet or beat our projected dates for production on screwdrivers overall.

 

We did have some production delays with silvers, and we weren't able to reach the max output that was expected before we started production, but since we underpromised on those shipping dates we did match or beat wave 1, 2, and 3 ship dates for silver shafts in 98% of cases.

That is the goal. We had basically recovered from the initial launch wave of tickets up until last week, when we started seeing 4-6x our normal daily inbound tickets - partially due to some of the concerns you've outlined here with labels being printed too early and updates not coming soon enough, as well as a number of other factors with shipping and import issues.

 

We're making adjustments that we can - we've reassigned a few more people to that team, made offers to a number of temporary employees that we've engaged with in the past, and added a few additional roles to the hiring board. Unfortunately we aren't as nimble as we need to be, and that's something that will be top of the list for improvement moving forward.

 

I'll see what can be done about a place in line or reply estimate, especially something automated. I expect we'll be able to provide something like that in the future, I'm just not sure how quickly we can get it together to ensure that it's done in an accurate and up-to-date way.

We may explore live chat in the future, we are adding additional staff but our only priority right now is getting reply times down to 24 hours or less.

Already in progress.

I'll give this some thought and try to sort out what type of update makes sense here. Public post probably makes more sense than a newsletter email, but will work on something.

We absolutely should have had more support staff ready to go, that's 100% a failure on my part. Scaling can be tough, and we're learning a lot along the way, but there is a lot that I could and should have done better in this case.

 

We have doubled our support staff (with 2 more additions happening imminently), and I believe our distributor as almost doubled their daily staff as well during this period.

 

Couple more points:

Our team is shipping 2,000 orders per day with a team of ~15 right now. We've made some mistakes, but we have stuck to our proposed schedule for shipping silver shaft drivers. We knew we'd be capable of doing that, and we have. As mentioned above, we're making mistakes with pre-printing some labels too early, but we've met or beat those shipping date estimates in about 98% of cases.

A post on the forum would have similar limitations, but I definitely should be doing a better job of keeping info up to date on the site.

 

We utilize Wizmo because the biggest complaint we had from customers for years was the cost of our shipping (since we show real rates, while many brands effectively hide the "real" cost of their shipping in inflated product pricing). The only negotiating power you get with carriers is scale, so the way to improve on that major customer complaint was to find an aggregator, and Wizmo came very highly recommended from some close & trusted partners. And to be fair to them, they've been an awesome partner for us as well.

 

The issue right now is that our recent growth has even broken some of their processes... we went from a max # of orders of like 25,000 in a month previously to almost 100,000 (obviously shipping less than that per month). Our latest invoices have literally broken Wizmo's templates, with some digits half-hidden because the total value doesn't even fit in their "TOTAL" cell lol.

 

The last few months have been unprecedented for us, our distributor, and our carrier. We're all doing our best to make improvements, but I totally agree that we haven't done enough.

 

 

 

Again, I really appreciate the feedback, and we're working on most of the points you brought up here. I know I've done a poor job of executing on a lot of what we've experienced in the last few months, but all I can say is that we're learning lessons and trying to get things back on track to provide an excellent experience to everyone who buys with us.

Thank you for the well thought out reply, it adds a lot of context to the situation that I'm sure is appreciated. 

For myself, I'm wondering if you can provide any insight into why order number doesn't seem to matter in regards to shipping the black shaft screwdriver. I'm a #361xxx order number and I'm seeing quite a few 366xxx-368xxx numbers that are already delivered and peoples hands. 

I don't mind waiting for the driver, but I feel like order number doesn't matter. Feels bad man. 

[aresthefierce]

22 hours ago, Just that Mario said:

You guys do realise that all the notifications and shipment updates are automated? "label is printed" is just the first step in the process. It means literally that the package was registered, label was printed for it and now it is waiting for the actual delivery company to show up and pick it up. Often enough they don't come until certain threshold is met. Grown up people placing orders on or during a new hot release during upcoming holiday season and completely surprised when shipping is delayed?

I've ordered from LTTStore and had to contact the support and it for sure isn't as bad as you make it to be. It seems that you're just blaming LTTStore for your own impatience.

@Just that MarioNice of you to come in disrespectful and condescending like that. Also nice of you to try and invalidate my experience. You clearly didn't read my post. I never actually complained about the delay in shipping.  I don't have an issue with my order taking longer than expected. I actually even said: 
 

On 11/18/2022 at 1:56 PM, aresthefierce said:

 I understand they are in the middle of large drops of the backpack and screw driver, on top of that we are approaching the holidays. These things understandably would create some delays.
 

...

Honestly I'm not in that big of a rush for a desk pad, Its not like my life depends on it or anything remotely close to that level of need. I think most of us are in that same boat with our orders, these are all things we want, not things we need (there are likely some people with pressure to get it by the holidays but if its a little late its not the end of the world).

 

My issue was that after reaching out about my order to CS I didn't hear back for several days, its now been several days since I posted this and I still have not got any reply back from CS (It's been a full 5 business days since I reached out to CS, that is by their own admission not a good business practice). I also went on the forum and saw many other people having the same experience so I made the post above. At this point I don't really need to hear back from CS as I understand what's going on from Nick's wonderful reply as well as Handro posting those tweets. 

I even said in my post that I previously worked in shipping. I have a good understanding of how the process works which is why I felt there are some things they could be doing better, for example not printing labels as early as they are. Like you said printing the label automatically creates email that goes out that says your order has shipped. Doing that two weeks before it's going to ship is a bad idea and leads to more customer service tickets bogging them down.

Maybe you had a different experience working with CS but that doesn't mean I haven't had the experience I have had. Maybe try not to invalidate people's experiences and belittle them or better yet mind your business when you don't actually have anything of value to contribute to a conversation. 

[Just that Mario]

1 hour ago, aresthefierce said:

Nice of you to come in disrespectful and condescending like that

How was I being disrespectful? You are literally showing your impatience in rest of your reply, where you are complaining customer support has not replied within a few days or even a week. If that's not impatience then, idk what to say. LTTStore has a big notification banner saying the reply times are longer and up to few weeks. Maybe it's time to wake up and realise the world doesn't revolve around you and your issues. There are more than a few people contacting them and they'll get to you once they get to you. I am impatient AF and I managed to wait out the week or two it took to get initial response, so I am sure you can as well. I am just sick of endless posts about people complaining over no response from support when for most it has been maximum a few days since their last ticket submission. Not long ago there was a person saying they sent like five tickets a day.

Not to mention Linus said they have doubled and soon tripled the support staff.

[aresthefierce]

4 hours ago, Just that Mario said:

How was I being disrespectful? 

On 11/19/2022 at 1:41 PM, Just that Mario said:

Grown up people placing orders on or during a new hot release during upcoming holiday season and completely surprised when shipping is delayed?

Bruh, you can't be this unaware of your tone in your reply. You basically implied that anyone who is frustrated by the CS lack of response was being childish for expecting a response from customer service with in a few days. When the reality is that is totally normal. It's almost a standard practice in business to respond to your customers within 24 hours. Beyond that leads to upset customers. Don't believe me? Look at this survey regarding expectations around customer service times. https://www.toistersolutions.com/blog/how-quickly-should-you-respond-to-email 

 

Heck the first line of the article is : "One day is too long to respond to email.", it goes on to state that roughly 1/3 of people surveyed want a response in 1 hour or less and on average most business only take around 12 hours to reply.  

 

To quote the survey "A separate study discovered that waiting for a response was the number one reason customers complained on Twitter."

 

 

I also want to point out you contradict yourself from first post to second post.

On 11/19/2022 at 1:41 PM, Just that Mario said:

I've ordered from LTTStore and had to contact the support and it for sure isn't as bad as you make it to be. It seems that you're just blaming LTTStore for your own impatience.

4 hours ago, Just that Mario said:

I am impatient AF and I managed to wait out the week or two it took to get initial response, so I am sure you can as well.

....

I am just sick of endless posts about people complaining over no response from support when for most it has been maximum a few days since their last ticket submission.

Apparently I'm making the situation to seem worse than it is, but it took you 1-2 weeks to get a response, meaning they are taking long to get back to customers. Why are you the authority on how long people should wait before getting frustrated? Also why are these people who are complaining about the response times any less childish than you complaining about people complaining?

You also lie in your second post. Are you trying to gaslight me here or something?

4 hours ago, Just that Mario said:

 LTTStore has a big notification banner saying the reply times are longer and up to few weeks. 

There is no time table given. There is no expectation set about it could take a week to get a response. They only say may be delayed. Some people would consider a reply in longer than 12 hours delayed, some would say longer than 24 hours would be delayed, others might say after 48 hours it's delayed. This is very open to interpretation, meaning it's ineffective communication that does not set any expectation of how long it will take to hear back. 

Listen, I think you're probably a huge fan of Linus and want to believe he and the LTT team can do no wrong. But that's not the reality of it. They are all just normal people like you and me. It's fair to say they dropped the ball here. As evidence there have been enough people complaining about the situation that you are sick of hearing it. Should people be putting in 5 tickets a day, hell no. But is it reasonable to be like "hey my order hasn't shipped in 2 weeks, what's up guys?" absolutely. If you are sick of hearing about it, get off the forum. Everyone has a right to voice their issues going on, and many companies see the value in criticism. They understand that criticism teaches them how to better service their customers and how to be a better company, which was my goal with my initial post. I outlined an issue I was experiencing along with many other customers and gave constructive criticism as well as potential solutions. End of story.  

[nicklmg]

On 11/20/2022 at 7:29 AM, Valk9005 said:

Thank you for the well thought out reply, it adds a lot of context to the situation that I'm sure is appreciated. 

For myself, I'm wondering if you can provide any insight into why order number doesn't seem to matter in regards to shipping the black shaft screwdriver. I'm a #361xxx order number and I'm seeing quite a few 366xxx-368xxx numbers that are already delivered and peoples hands. 

I don't mind waiting for the driver, but I feel like order number doesn't matter. Feels bad man. 

If you haven't received even a shipping label yet we'll have to look into that. Some labels were printed out of order due to how they were batch printing but they should have still shipped in order.

I'll DM you for detail.

[Furbys]

On 11/18/2022 at 6:56 PM, aresthefierce said:

These experiences will leave a bad taste in people's mouths. It will leave people debating whether or not this a company that is trustworthy. It will certainly make people think, "Should I really buy something again from LTT store after what happened last time?".

This. Having waited so long for the screwdriver to come out I didn’t expect support to be on the same pace. 
 

Watching the secret shopper videos and the expectations (I perceive) LTT/LMG place on other companies I was expecting better. 

In my case I can’t change the shipping address on my screwdriver that hasn’t been shipped (or tracking number created). Cancel your order and buy a new one doesn’t feel like customer support. Just that we don’t have resource to help. 

 

*edit - wait this might be solved by support and I take that back…

[Headword]

I know how you feel. I ordered a water bottle a few days after the screw driver (around sept 6th i think) and it has received the same level of service. 

[Headword]

27 minutes ago, NastyFlytrap said:

Either way, i dont like this approach of 'fuckit, we're going to sell tens of thousands of these things anyway, overloading support for half a year is a price worth paying'
Yea, no healthy company does that. Crunch or no crunch on the employees. Its still bad service no matter how you slice it. 
You should have slowly ramped up to this, both by hiring people over time, and stocking up on the screwdrivers, instead of putting them up for order months before they are even ready to ship and even months after they shipped you're still only starting to hire people.

This is just idiotic. Chill out, keep it in your pants for a little longer. We've waited 3 years, we could have waited a few more months to gradually build up to this, instead of this mad dash to get them out the door

In fairness, they did warn us hundreds of times over the years about the dangers of pre ordering and giving a company your money before they had the product to give you.

I wonder if this will get an honorable mention on a kickfarted episode. (My annoyance is real however this message is mostly a joke, I know this wasn't on Kickstarter so it does not qualify for kickfarted)

[dizzimure]

9 hours ago, Furbys said:

This. Having waited so long for the screwdriver to come out I didn’t expect support to be on the same pace. 
 

Watching the secret shopper videos and the expectations (I perceive) LTT/LMG place on other companies I was expecting better. 

In my case I can’t change the shipping address on my screwdriver that hasn’t been shipped (or tracking number created). Cancel your order and buy a new one doesn’t feel like customer support. Just that we don’t have resource to help. 

 

*edit - wait this might be solved by support and I take that back…

This  is exactly what happened to me. I needed the city changed. Everything else was right, street, zip code, etc. My family had just moved to a new city and i typed in my old one. I have done this before. A technoblade plushie. Guess what, they updated my address without requiring me to cancel. Sounds like its a shopify limitation.

Whole order has to be canceled (Wave 2 Black shaft, and RGB Hoodie) which put my new order in i think wave 5. The nice customer support person assured me my black shaft order would be updated for Wave 2 like my original. But... i see Wave 2 Black Shafts on the forum going out and haven't gotten a ping. I am worried i am not actually in Wave 2, but I don't dare to email and swarm them with more grief. My main concern now are my other 2 orders.

One was ordered in September (happened to have bits, my dumb mistake for thinking those were in stock and would ship soon) and xmas gifts on 11/24, no updates, no understanding of timelines, nothing. I am fine with delays, I can't stand no updates. Even if its not personalized and even if it says "we are prioritizing silver shafts for the next 3 months, don't expect a black shaft until March. Would that suck? Sure, but i would know where we stand.

 

[Headword]

I made a similar mistake ordering a water bottle and a set of bits a few days after my screw driver because it said NOTHING about delays on those items however now my screw driver has a shipping label and just shy of 3 months later nothing about my water bottle.

[Headword]

That's why I like to bring it up when joking about serious issues. 

The people who know them remember and Pepperidge Farm remembers.....