August 17th
Spent the last few days digging out the office from all of the clutter and paperwork left scattered around in my drive to ship as many orders as possible before my flight left on the 29th of July. Finally all of the orders received up until this morning have been scheduled and the estimated ship dates updated on the respective sales orders. Copies of the revised sales orders with the estimated ship date were sent out via e-mail around 6pm this evening. If you don’t receive anything please check your SPAM filter/folder and if you still don’t have the message please e-mail me at orderstatus@mkiiwatches.com or call me during the day.
As some of you may remember I had crystals get hung up at the AR coater in July which meant that some orders that were supposed to ship before I left didn’t get finished. This resulted in my pushing back some earlier quoted ship dates in order to re-schedule those orders. I have also decreased the number of watches scheduled to ship per week so that customer service levels can get back to normal.
Thanks for everyone’s patience.
August 15th
I am back from my trip. At the moment I am processing the orders received since July 19th so that I may assess and assign timetables to those orders.
I will begin responding to orders status requests made via e-mail Wednesday after I have the new orders organized.
In the near term the following is underway to improve communication and resume a normal customer service level (which was lacking due to poor planning on my part with regards to delivering all of the pre-ordered MMTs.):
* An online (i.e. web based) order status system has been in the works over the last 6 weeks. Although with some delay the system is currently expected to come online around the first week of September. This system is being developed in response to the increasingly aggressive filters set up to reduce SPAM by ISPs which unfortunately also affects an increasing amount of legitimate correspondence sent from us. Also this should serve as a more efficient method of sending out order status updates and to request information from customers about orders that are in process.
* E-mails sent to the “info” account before the beginning of August will unfortunately have to be deleted wholesale. The strain of delivering the volume of watches that I have shipped over the last 6 months has meant that I didn’t have an opportunity to respond to e-mail inquiries to this account for quite some time. Each of those messages will receive an automated reply asking that if they still require the information requested to re-submit their message. Unfortunately this is the most practical solution given the volume of e-mail and considering that many of the older messages probably do not require a reply at this time. Please accept my apologies for this inconvenience.
* Over the next couple of weeks the web site will be revised in order to provide a more detailed list of our policies and shipping and handling procedures. In addition the ordering pages will be modified so that the lead times and information about out of stock parts can be updated more frequently. With regards to updated lead times that information has been unfortunately overly time consuming to update given the way the site was originally designed. In the future lead time information for all of our products and services will be consoldiated onto one page….the current “lead time” icon listed on the bottom of most pages will activate a pop-up window that will show this consolidated list.
* I am happy to announce that all of the pre-ordered MMTs have been completed with only a handful left to ship. Next time around I will have to figure out a better way to manage this process.
While I was in San Francisco I had the pleasure of meeting a few watch collectors/enthusiasts. I wanted to thank Mike, Eric, Drew, Ian, Gerard, and Gordon for making the time to meet with me.