HansdeRu
For more than three weeks now, I have been trying in vain to get in touch with FOTOIMPEX. Emails sent on 26 November, 5 and 12 December have gone unanswered, and the phone number (+493028599081) is always busy. I would like to know what has happened to the enlarger cassette I returned (sent back on 6 November due to a fault). Help!
MirkoBoeddecker
Dear Mr Hadeer,
It’s exactly as you describe: our phone hasn’t stopped ringing with customers who all desperately want to order something before Christmas – things they didn’t want to, shouldn’t have, or couldn’t order earlier.
We’d actually prepared for this sort of thing, but then 50% of our staff fell ill one after the other (the flu was going round).
On top of that, we lost a week due to the move.
In fact, there are now only three of us in the dispatch department. It’s simply impossible to manage everything. We’ve had to prioritise. Our aim is this: anything that has a chance of being delivered before Christmas (because everything is a priority) must be with DHL by this evening at the latest; we’ll deal with everything else after Christmas.
We are now about four days behind in replying to emails.
One of your older emails had apparently already reached me on Friday. If you are the customer from Holland with the Kaiser mask frame (the frame has already been assessed), then you should have received a credit note on Friday.
New frames have also been ordered.
Please contact us again after Christmas regarding a subsequent delivery.
I am very sorry that you have had to wait so long.
Kind regards,
Mirko Bödecker
HansdeRu
It took a while :) , but in the end everything was sorted to my complete satisfaction.
Gast
It’s an old post, but it seems the issue is still relevant?
It’s November 2012, and Christmas is still a while away, but nobody at FOTOIMPEX seems to be replying to emails; in any case, I’ve been waiting for a reply for two weeks now. I’ve tried via the contact form and also by regular email.
It’s a shame that customer service doesn’t seem to be a priority. A downside of a lack of ‘real’ competition?
MirkoBoeddecker
If emails go unanswered, it may also be because there is a technical issue – either on our end or the recipient’s.
In such cases, I therefore recommend picking up the phone as an alternative.
We usually manage to reply to an email within three days. From the middle of the week onwards, it’s even quicker.
The reason it cannot be done any faster is not so much a lack of competition as a reflection of our profit margin situation, which does not allow us to hire more staff.
On the other hand, however, it is precisely this profit margin situation that means there is little or no competition left…
