In relation to Traidcraft plc, "customers" include:
Turnaround times for orders have been very strong throughout the year (i.e. 99.9% of Fair Trader orders within 48 hours and 99.9% of Mail Order customer orders within 72 hours).
Food stock availability has averaged 98%. Disappointingly our non-food availability (predominantly craft lines) was poor during the latter part of the Autumn with a significant number of craft lines selling out before the end of the Autumn season.
This was a result of higher than expected uptake in some lines and a lack of co-ordination between forecasting volumes during order placing and the catalogue distribution plans that were subsequently put in place for our mail order business. Measures have been put in place to address this weakness for the Autumn 2007 season.
See section on Fair Traders for information on service levels.
Customer Order Complaints
During the last six years we have been running a database to record and analyse the various types of feedback on problems relating to sales made by Traidcraft plc.
This covers everything from serious issues (for example a foreign body found in a food item or damage to health caused by consuming a Traidcraft product), to concerns over packaging/delivery, to exchanges being requested on incorrect clothing sizes and so on.
Through monitoring of this data we aim to reduce the cause of any concerns and provide better customer service.
Results for the 2006-2007 year are given below:
And the pattern over the last 5 years has been:
| Target | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 |
| Number of Orders | N/A | 87,000 | 98,000 | 110,000 | 139,500 | 130,500 |
| Number of Parcels | N/A | 120,000 | 155,000 | 185,000 | 230,000 | 219,000 |
| Complaints Logged | N/A | 1,910 | 2,960 | 4,206 | 5,411 | 6,499 |
| % Complaints on Orders | Reduce | 2.2 | 3.0 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 5.0 |
| % Complaints on Parcels | Reduce | 1.6 | 1.9 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 3.0 |
Disappointingly the percentage of complaints has increased this year. This is mainly due to an increasing number of complaints relating to the parcel carrier.
Traidcraft categorises its product complaints in a 4-tier system, each tier of this system has a guideline attached to it to assist Traidcraft staff to categorise product complaints consistently. The most severe level of concern is reserved exclusively for instances where customer injury and/or safety are reported. An example of this would be damage to teeth, or illness resulting from consuming Traidcraft foods, injury or harm from other Traidcraft crafts.
There were only eight complaints that have been categorised as severe in 2006-2007. Five relate to reports of damage to teeth (three cookies, one boiled sweets and one muesli). The other three related to reports of foreign bodies in products.
Directors' Comment
The non-food out of stock position this autumn and the level of complaints about damage caused by carriers are both causes for concern this year.
However, order turn-around times and generally high levels satisfaction with service levels are encouraging.
The quality of the design of our new non-food product range launched in the Spring 2007 catalogue has led to very positive customer feedback.
During the year we have tried to source external benchmarks against which we can compare ourselves. We have been unable to source benchmarks at an affordable cost. We shall continue to look to reduce the number and severity of complaints.
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