“We established Ina McCarthy for flowers in 2006. My Mum Ina set it up and we have been running it together ever since. We started in a much smaller premises off the Main Street before moving to our larger shop on the Main Street in 2011. We went from a team of two to a team of 7.
“We are a very popular wedding florist, we have a very busy online and retail shop and we are also an Interflora member. So, as you can imagine trying to keep track of all of these and the never-ending mountain of wedding consultations and wedding admin, we were becoming a shop of piles of paper orders that needed to be counted and sorted after busy periods. It was a nightmare, that topped with 7 different types of hand writing. I lost count of the amount of text messages I had to send to staff members asking them what their hand writing meant. Now with Strelitzia, all our orders are in the same order and are clear and easy to read.
“Then there were all the deliveries and hand writing out delivery sheets – what a pain! And then numbers and postcodes being written down wrong. Now they are all in one place and we can change the order at a click of a button.
“This Christmas we were also able to spread out orders over earlier dates as with Strelitzia we knew very quickly which dates closer to Christmas were becoming very busy and we moved collection and deliveries dates to earlier in the month. This spread out our overall work load and really helped at such a busy peak period. We are planning on doing the same for Valentine’s and moving orders to the Friday and Saturday.
“We have an ecommerce website and Interflora, so Strelitzia pulling everything into one place makes things so much easier and clearer. Having uniform order sheets also makes Interflora orders, our web orders and our phone orders uniform.
“I also love the instant invoices; it looks so professional and is so easy at the touch of a button.
“One feature which has been amazing is saving our customers details and previous orders; we can key into their spend and even maybe do a bit of up selling plus you can really see how loyal some customers are.
“I love that all the orders are recorded so no counting orders at the end of the month.
“The customer service of the team at Strelitzia is impeccable. They answer any problems within 10 minutes which is exceptional and also so reassuring.
“I would recommend Strelitzia to any florist who wants to stream line their business, cut back on admin, and keep a record of customers – especially loyal ones. It has made the day to day running of our business so much easier. It is very easy to use and all our staff took to it so fast. I look forward to having more customers on our data base to make taking orders faster and more efficient.”
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