The year 2020 has been an incredibly challenging time for all of us and I wanted to personally thank you for your continued loyalty and support to YPO.
I know that this year some of our customers may have experienced disruption and inconvenience following the upgrade to our IT system at the end of last year and the impact COVID-19 has had on us as a business and our suppliers. At YPO we have a strong reputation for providing an excellent customer experience to our customers and I know over the last few months we have fallen short of this as a supplier and for that, I am truly sorry.
I hope this communication goes some way in apologising to you and hopefully give you the confidence that we’re doing our very best to ensure we continue to improve our service and we will keep working closely with our customers.
As you may know, we carried out an essential upgrade to our back-office systems, and as part of our YPO values of being straight-talking, I’m being honest in saying it didn’t go as we had planned. We are aware that this could have brought difficulties for you which I know must have been a very stressful and frustrating time for you in placing and receiving your orders.
Please know that our customers are extremely important to us and so our highest priority has been to resolve the challenges with our system as soon as we could and to return to the high level of service you are used to receiving from us.
The impact of COVID-19 further heightened ordering issues. At the start of the pandemic to ensure we could continue to deliver our customers with the services and products they needed we made the difficult decision to provide essential items such as PPE, food, cleaning and hygiene products to our public sector customers only. We were pleased to open all our range to all our customers in June but with that came challenges. As our supplier’s employees had been furloughed during the first lockdown, and that the global demand for products was high across all the supply chain, this brought with it a great impact on stock availability, which impacted our lead times and at times meant you may have had items missing from your orders. I want to reassure you we’ll continue to work with our suppliers to ensure we can deliver our products to you as quickly as we can.
Again, I would like to thank you for your continued patience and understanding, and rest assured, we are returning to the excellent customer experience we have always been proud of.
If you would like to discuss anything with me, please email [email protected] and I will get back to you as soon as I can.
Take care and stay safe.