Dancing Deer wasted no time responding to yesterday’s post featuring a two-inch metal spear in a package of blondies. Trish Karter, Dancing Deer’s President, Chief Deer, and Floor Sweeper sent tipster Helen a wonderfully detailed apology and promised to conduct an investigation. Read her excellent mea culpa, after the jump.

Dear Helen,

Thank you so much for your patience and please accept my sincere apologies for your trouble. I was not aware of this situation until someone emailed me from the Consumerist site. I had been tied up yesterday when you called and it surfaced internally that the UPS package had never gone out to you. Apparently there was a lot of conversation about it here but none of it reached me. I had previously been aware that someone had reported a possible foreign object in a Blondie and that we were following procedure to get information from the consumer and obtain the foreign object so we could examine it and proceed with internal investigation.

It being a Saturday I have not been able to speak to everyone individually, but I have garnered some information and it is on that basis that I am responding. I didn’t want to his to go unanswered until Monday.

There were many failures here on our part:

• The call tag from UPS should have been issued the same day. I learned from Anna that your initial call had come in close to the time she leaves for the day on a Friday and her expectation was that the service team would have sent the package out the following Monday.
• Neither Anna nor the service team followed up to confirm that it had been done and then it apparently fell off everyone’s radar screen while we were busy with Valentine’s day (I offer that not as any kind of excuse but by way of hypothesis how we could possibly have dropped the ball on something so important).
• When it did surface yesterday, no-one informed me that we’d had a major customer service failure. Two weeks is a totally unacceptable period of time for such a thing to go on. Two days is unacceptable! We needed to know immediately not only to serve you better, but so that the internal tracking could be done as close to the production date and ship date as possible.

All of the people here at Dancing Deer that were involved in this failure are actually really terrific, talented, intelligent, caring, conscientious and hard working people. I am happy to tell you that this failure is not a pattern, but a really rare incident. Customer service is something we do really well. I am perplexed and troubled by the incident but more curious than anything else. It may, in the end, simply be explained by there having been a perfect storm of several people making an unusual error in both judgment and follow through simultaneously with the same customer. Sorry to say that would be you! I hope you will forgive us and stick with us while we seek to understand what that foreign object was to begin with.

By the way I am confused by the photograph that is posted on Consumerist.com. It appears to be Brownies, not Blondies, so any information you can give us will be helpful, and the more specific the better. If there is nay product left over please send that out. Anna confirmed to me today that the UPS call tag has now been issued. If you would like to speak to Anna this weekend please let me know and I can contact her.

You will note that the entire office team was copied on this email and I can assure you that there will be focus on this issue Monday morning and we will use our learnings from our poor performance with you to build a better organization with a higher level of confidence that such a thing could not happen again.

I have left you two voice messages, office and cell, and look forward to speaking with you. I am very sorry for your poor service and response from us. My cell phone is xxx-xxx-xxxx. Feel free to call me at your convenience.

Best regards,

Trish

That right there is the human touch that multinational conglomerates spend millions trying to emulate. It’s the difference between sugar and high fructose corn syrup: you just can’t beat the real thing.

PREVIOUSLY: This Two-Inch Metal Spear Does Not Belong In A Dancing Deer All-Natural, Organic Blondie

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