FTD.com and Mom
Today is my mom’s birthday and I forgot to send her a card. It’s been a long week. I moved to a new apartment, my hand still hurts from the incident, and the sun has been brutal….I am a terrible son.
At 10:00 a.m. this morning I attempted to fix this mess up by going to FTD.com. Their, and their competitor’s same day cutoff for Sunday delivery is noon in the timezone of the recipient. After viewing some truly awful mug-based arrangements I settled on the Bountiful Beauty Bouquet.
I even paid the extra few dollars for it to be “premium” despite believing there to be no difference between what they deliver. Customers rarely see the flowers they send and recipients aren’t going to say “wow it looks like you got me the regular”. Ogers don’t get flowers.
At 1:00p.m., almost 3 hours after my transaction had finished I receive a call from FTD customer service. They were going to be unable to fulfill my order today. If they had called me an hour or even and hour and forty-five minutes after I placed the order with this information I could have used their competitors. At 1:00p.m. though everyone had closed up shop for the day. After politely (always throws of customer service when you say thank you and please) escalating this argument 3 rungs up the ladder of Customer Service to speak to the manager’s manger’s manager I was given a final offer “Sir if anyone could have delivered flowers today it would have been FTD. All I can give you is a discount on the same flowers delivered tomorrow.”
If USAA sold flowers they would have found a way to get my mom something even if they had to build a time machine, go back to Thursday and remind me to order it earlier.
Although I am reluctant to admit this, Martha Stewart has amazing flowers. They are delivered on time, each stem comes individually wrapped and they are roughly the same price as FTD. So it you can stomach giving $$ to Little Ms. Perfect, go to Martha. If you are really, really late (which I am, often), call a local florist and have them send something that day. And of course, there is always www.someecards.com.
Joe, my name is John Hancock (really) and I work corpoarte communications for USAA. Without sounding too much like a commercial and without the ability to travel back in time, I did want you to know that USAA could have helped you with your flower dilemma – and saved you a few dollars too. While USAA does not directly sell flowers, we do have a business relationship with Teleflora. Teleflora offers a 20% discount to USAA members and you can avoid missing an important occasion (like your mom’s birthday) by ordering ahead. You can actually order floral arrangements up to one year in advance! USAA members can place orders by calling the USAA-dedicated group of Teleflora employees at (800) 769-7673 or by visiting USAA.COM/FLOWERS.
yet again proof that USAA is the best company in America….other than Naked…oh and of course our clients.