Posted by: Rupert - Flower Student on December 28th, 2007

Hi. My name’s Rupert and I’ve been working as a customer service rep at Arena Flowers for a few months now to earn some cash to support my glamorous student lifestyle of baked beans on toast. Everything had gone as expected in the CS role, happily answering calls, updating orders etc until the 20th of December, a day very different from those that went before.

I should have known something was up when our managing director (who also happens to be my eldest brother) approached me with a disconcerting smile plastered over his face. He asked me if I’d like to go out delivering some of our beautiful Christmas flowers and gifts across London. You may be wondering why the managing director would be going out delivering plus recruiting one of his phone jockeys to help him. The answer is simple: Christmas + flowers = lots of orders, so it’s all hands to the pumps at such times…and it was a great day!

We grabbed the 15 Christmas bouquets and gifts for our first run and set off on our merry Christmas jaunt. As we had got all the flowers and thoughtful gifts in the van, our head of distribution, Mariusz, came with the list of all the recipients all the other information including the vital special delivery instructions which we do our very best to follow. On every run drivers also get a one page Google map with a marker for every delivery that needs to be made printed on it, so that the drivers can map the fastest (and most fuel efficient) route quickly and easily. Having planned our route, we set off at 11:15 to one of the furthest points on the map. There was method to our madness - to make sure that customers who had paid for a timed delivery got their flowers delivered within the relevant time slot. Our first drop of a Chrismas Celebration deluxe to a Mrs Mackintosh was completed by 11:50.

Using a PDA system developed by Zach, our technical whizz, we were able to immediately update the system which in turn alerted our customer that the flowers had been delivered, by sending an email and a free text message confirming delivery.

On our way to our next drop we learnt an important lesson, which was that Sat Nav can be useless - it guided us down the King’s Road at midday on one of the busiest shopping days of the year, so it took nearly 40 mins to travel just over a mile! After this failure was followed by several instructions to go the wrong way down one way streets, we took it upon ourselves to prove it wrong and find more sensible routes to our destinations. The next delivery also took far longer than intended due to an incorrect postcode but using Sherlock Holmes like skills we deduced that the flowers were for Baker Street not Baker’s Close. After this meticulous piece of detective work we finally had a chance to beat the sat nav - rather than doing the 10 minute circle to deliver down a one way street we stopped where we were and I simply got out and walked around the corner and delivered a dozen white roses to a delighted recipient.

Here’s Will ignoring the Sat Nav again - eyes on the road might have been a better idea!

With these extra ten minutes under our belts we then delivered another and went on to deliver a whopping ten more orders without a hitch and enjoyed some beautiful views of London in winter in the process. I’d never expected driving round London to be such a picturesque way of earning funds to pay for my studies!

The Natural History Museum:

Delivering flowers to flower lovers is fun:

The London Eye:

The Houses of Parliament - in December we delivered flowers to the great and the good, including the Prime Minister, Prince Michael of Kent and even to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, which got everyone in the office fairly excited!

Next up were two orders to the BBC the first was easy (see left) but the second turned out to be harder than we thought: we couldn’t leave the flowers at the correct building so we had to go in search of the main BBC post room (after I’d called to let the customer know, of course). The post room happens to be next door to a major BBC satellite beaming station (no vehicles fitted with radar allowed apparently) which was very sci-fi.

Our morning run done, we headed back to Flowers HQ…where a smiling Mariusz greeted us with another four London flower deliveries to make. Although initially we doubted we could we could manage them all in time, after a quick pep talk we realized that with the aid of arena power anything is possible and off we went!

 

Filed under: Christmas Flowers, Distribution, Flowers, General, Mega Days on December 28th, 2007

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