So, did you realize I was on vacation for the last week? 😉

Yeah, I scheduled those blog posts to post while I was gone so I was blogged while I wasn’t actually here. That’s how I roll. 😉

My husband and I just returned from a lovely 12 day vacation which was very much needed as we hadn’t been on a vacation since Fall of 2008 so it was well overdue.

As you may recall, I wrote this post musing about the damage that vacation can do to your feedback and I regretfully report that, though I’ve only been back a few hours, the first of the damage from going on vacation has already made itself known. I tried my best with auto replies on every email, a vacation responder on out site and store and I even emailed every buyer who bought from us in the last few weeks ahead of time to let them know replies would be delayed.

On Feb 28th, a buyer emailed threatening bad feedback on an issue that I would have been happy to grant a refund on to save both the feedback and the customer but I had checked email that morning and didn’t check it again until I returned just now. Of course, as he threatened he would, he left a single star rating because I didn’t answer him right away. He apologized in a later email saying he realized that was jerk of him since he knew I wasn’t in the office to answer him and he actually liked the item after all but there is the nasty little rating all the same and no amount of apologies is going to remove it.

I was trying to only check email every few days to not work too much and this is the thanks I get, eh?

Do I care? Only on some far away “principal of the thing” level. I know that I wouldn’t have gotten that rating if I’d been on normal work duty so it’s a direct result of my vacation. If the only cost to my business is that one bad rating for a whole week of vacation, it seems a fair trade. Of course, it remains to be seen what all the other people who ignored the vacation messages decide to do when they get their items but let’s keep our fingers crossed that the damage is minimal.

I just thought it was funny that even though I checked email and worked over vacation, a problem still snuck in under the radar just as I feared. Oh well, what can you do?