A Message About Customer Service Response
Dear Valued AT Fans,
It took longer than any of us would have liked, but our extreme failures in providing timely customer service have finally bubbled up to flood across my desk. First and foremost I want to apologize for my failures as the Chief Tentacle here at Alternative Tentacles in not realizing this failing sooner, but also want to assure all of you that we are taking immediate proactive measures both to improve the quality and timeliness of our customer support and to make sure that when things slip like they have recently that it’s not a matter of a buried inbox that one person is staring at in a private state of rising panic.
I also want to make it clear how much I appreciate all of those who have brought this up, sometimes multiple times, because without your dedication to seeing things improve it might have taken even longer before I personally realized we had an issue. Since taking over as Chief Tentacle in 2023 I have led us down a road focused heavily on increasing the amount of records we’re pressing every year, with a specific eye towards restoring access to our back catalog. As a direct and entirely foreseeable consequence of this we have done more business and had a substantial increase in the sheer number of customers contacting us across all platforms and our historic infrastructure (one person, doing multiple jobs, one of which was single-handedly responding to all customer contacts) has not kept up with the growth we’ve started to have and hope to maintain.
Our goal is to ensure that any customer service emails, social media comments, or any other channel for reaching out is responded to as soon as possible. Starting next week, you will be able to expect a response within one or at most two business days. As a strong believer in transparency, and to try to earn back some of that trust we may have, very reasonably, eroded, here is a detailed breakdown of our plans to revamp our customer service to ensure that y’all get the answers you need quickly, efficiently, and accurately:
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All hands on deck! We have dedicated today (Friday the 13th 😱) to going through the entire backlog of customer service emails we have received to catch back up.
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We are hiring a dedicated customer support person! This is someone we have worked with before in setting up our new website, wordsmithing, and general ad-hoc tasks. She is joining us in getting back to that coveted inbox 0 today and will be ramping up as our primary customer liaison over the next week or so.
- Technological Wizardry?? Alternative Tentacles has been around for a while (45 years now!) and many of our systems would feel very comfortable to someone who traveled forward in time from then, which is maybe less than ideal. Our new Customer Liaison & Information Technology Specialist will also be setting up a new customer service tool for us: Front. If nothing else, this system will ensure that if your messages aren’t responded to for more than 2 business days then alarms will be going off, I’ll find out about it, and heads may or may not roll - we truly are that determined to make sure your words aren’t falling on deaf ears!
For our pre-order customers and especially Patreon backers we are also taking additional steps to ensure that you are kept wholly in the loop and not left wondering whether we’ve just taken your money and run away with it. Please rest assured, every dollar you spend with Alternative Tentacles goes to supporting our artists and producing and distributing their art. Your pre-orders make it possible for us to do things like re-press old viruses by giving us the capital to get the records re-pressed in the first place and while the timeline from you excitedly throwing your money at us and us eagerly shipping you your long-out-of-print records has been far longer than we had initially anticipated, we want to make it clear that we are doing everything in our power to get your much-deserved vinyl into your hands to which end, we’re making some changes to pre-orders as well:
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Pre-Order Production updates: moving forward we are going to be proactively notifying pre-order customers of all relevant production delays or updates as well as providing the best possible estimate we can on when your orders will be fulfilled.
- Split Pre-Order shipping: historically, our shipping system operated in such a way that ordering a pre-order along with other products meant that you wouldn’t get anything until everything was ready to ship. No longer! There will likely be some wrinkles to iron out especially with shipping costs for international deliveries, but we want to make sure that y’all can at least have the option of receiving the things we do have as soon as possible.
With these new systems in place, along with plans to continue evolving and improving our processes, I hope that we can start rebuilding some of the trust that we’ve squandered and bring you the quality of experience that you should be able to expect from the oldest independent punk label in the world.
With my sincerest apologies,
Freya Hausman
Chief Tentacle of Alternative Tentacles Records