Hello folks,

Happy New Year to you all. I hope this year is a cracker for you!!

I’m going to make a concious effort this year to be a better blogger (famous last words). Part of the reason for my blogging demise towards the end of last year was that little event plonked towards the end of December - namely Christmas. So, I thought it would be nice to share some of our ramblings and give you a little insight into the typical day at Prezzybox.com during December and how much fun (!!!) it is…

5.45am - get up.

6.00am - Get to work (I live very close to work hence, the speed. Don’t worry, I won’t smell - I’ll have showered the night before).

6.05am - Start processing orders from the previous night. Historically we’d have processed all orders manually which was a very ssslllloooowwww process. In fact in the very old days, we used a PDQ machine (like the ones you get in shops) which used to take chuffin ages. Now, thanks to our super techies a lot of orders are auto-processed and ones that aren’t take seconds to process. We can therefore process 1000’s of orders a day.

7.30am - 8.30am - Staff start rolling in. Everybody is pretty much customer services focussed in December so its computers on, and then busily beavering away answering emails, quiries, doing refunds till we hear the dreaded ring of the phone starts at 9 bells…

 9.00am - Phones go on… Literally within a nano-second all of our lines light up with customers phoning up with such gems as “When is my order going to arrive”, “You’ve sent me a pole dancing kit instead of a pet plant”, “If I order now will it arrive before Christmas”. You get the idea…

 We also manufacture our own Personalised Calendars and Father Christmas Letters so we have to start the big old print machine running and print off the plethora of Calendars that have come in from the night before.

 9.00am-1pm - It’s just a matter of keeping on top of everything. This sounds easy, but it’s not, I assure you. Basically our orders increase by a factor of 15, which basically means we are 15 times busier in every single way - from customer emails, to stock orders coming into the warehouse, to phone calls, everything is multiplied by a factor of 15. This is compounded by the fact that 99.9% of your customers want their order for the same day. Yep - you’ve guessed it, the 25th. Consequently the nearer to Christmas it gets the more people start to panic that they are not going to get their goodies. So it’s our job to reassure them that everythings fine and not to worry as they’re order will be with them before Santa comes…

1pm - Time for lunch (ordinarily a take away pub lunch - we’re based in a farm house and thus don’t have such luxury as Maccy D’s), and also to have a meeting with our head of security - OK,  time to take Polly - the office retreiver and canine who sends out all of our emails - out for a walk and a 10 minute break from the computer.

1pm - 6pm. More of the same really… It really is mayhem. True, it’s not as bad as when we used to pack all of the orders ourselves - that was Pandemonium, but is still really hectic and pretty stressful. The constant ringing of the phone gives you a headache, whilst customer services staff members shouting across the office to see “when stock is going to arrive”, through to “don’t worry, I’ve sorted out that customer” adds to the tension. This combined with the buyers trying desperately trying to buy a few hundred more of this and that always add’s to the mix.

4pm - Royal Mail arrive at 4 (on the dot every day!!) to collect our sack-fulls of Calendars. It always puts a smile on my face to see a product that we’ve manufactured from scratch being sent out to a customer. 

 6pm-Close. At 6pm we turn the phones on to answer machine. Phew! In an ideal World we’d leave them on, but we always like to use this time to try and tie up a lot of loose ends.

8pm - Teatime (and beer time). Time to relax and then invariably time to fall asleep on the settee during Ramsey’s kitchen nightmares…

All of the above combined with various other traumas such as our servers going down, through to a number of our orders being sent out twice, all makes for a pretty stressful few weeks. And then as soon as its begun, it stops. 3 Weeks of madness and then it’s back to normality. It’s a real shock to the system.

And then it’s back to work in January… and the first meeting of the year… Christmas 2008 planning. Eeek!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under General Chat. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.