Nobody is perfect. Despite all of our best intentions, all humans make mistakes.
The same statement is true for companies as well. After all, great companies – the ones who truly care about their customers and will do whatever it takes to build a base of loyal fans – often have the great leaders and employees at the helm, steering their business in the right direction. However, things don’t always go perfectly according to plan, which is a lesson that we, and our customers, learned around the July 4th holiday.
What really separates a great person or company from an average – or even a good – one is how they rectify their mistakes and make things right. We’re always trying to make ourselves, our company, and our platform the very best that it can be, so that’s exactly what we tried to do when we slipped up a few weeks ago.
As many of you may know, military base mailrooms and shipping companies like FedEx tend to close for one or several days surrounding national holidays like Independence Day. Each branch’s bases have different closure schedules, the schedules of which are available to the public.
We always do our best to inform our users of these official base mailroom closures, and make sure that they have enough time to get a letter of support to their loved one going through boot camp or while deployed.
An error with attaching shipping labels meant that the Letters to Fort Jackson were sent and schedule to be delivered on July 6th once the mail rooms reopened after the holiday.
The problem with this? We already told our customers that their Letters would be in their trainees’ hands on July 3rd before the extended holiday. This would mean that trainees would not receive mail for several days over Independence Day, when many would sure to be looking out for some news from home.
We knew we had to take matters into our own hands to make good on our promise of next-day delivery.
To kick things off, members of our operations and leadership teams, including our CMO, CFO and CTO, started to reprint over 5,000 Letters destined for Fort Jackson, at our own expense, around midnight. Once all of those Letters were printed, we then had to manually sort them by battalion to ensure that the right Letter would get to the right place. This process took until roughly 4am.
Actual footage of Team Sandboxx
printing and sorting Letters around
2am on Tuesday, July 3rd
Once we had all of the Letter printed and sorted, Swamy, our beloved CTO and a member of our trusted package delivery team, got on a 6am Delta flight heading to Columbus, SC.
Fort Jackson-bound Letters being checked in
curbside at DCA around 5am
After a quick layover at the Atlanta airport, Swamy landed around 9:30am, and went to bag check to pick up the Letters. Fortunately, they all made it onto the luggage carousel without issue!
[wpvideo cditiBEN ]
Then, our Fort Jackson Marketing Rep, Tina, picked Swamy up at CAE, after which they headed to base to hand deliver your Letters to each battalion at Fort Jackson starting at 11:12am. Four hours, 11 stops, and countless hours of lost sleep later, all 5,000+ Fort Jackson Letters were successfully delivered to each battalion.
If we hadn’t done this, our customers would have seen a “delivery exception” status until Friday, July 6th, which is just a fancy way of saying that FedEx could not actually deliver them, since the mailroom on base is closed on July 4th and 5th.
We’ve known for a while how important our Letter service is to our military friends and family members. However, what we didn’t expect is how appreciative our users would be that we took the time to hand deliver the Letters! This goes to show that a simple action can go an incredibly long way in building a community of dedicated and loyal fans.
On behalf of all of us at Sandboxx, thanks to each and every one of your for your continued and unwavering support. We’re glad to know that you appreciate what we do for our customers, and that you feel that you can trust us in any circumstance to make good on our promise: to connect the military community.
