Dear Friends Living Abroad:
When Guts and Glory Tennis was founded in 2003, we built the business upon the cornerstone of unwavering customer service. Our published Philosophy of Service is to “Delight, marvel and inspire customers with world-class service emphasizing quality, consistency, innovation, convenience and value.”
We began as a local business eventually expanding into a national provider of tennis supplies and gifts. Our focus on customer satisfaction and service remains steadfast and true. As our web presence expands and we begin to carry products that are of interest to many abroad, our requests to serve international customers also grows. Up to this point we have done our best to provide quality service to international customers on a case-by-case basis. A recent exchange with an international customer helped us to realize that this group of customers is clearly not receiving a level of service and care that is congruent with our philopsophy and due to this, we have decided to suspend all international business activities for the time being.
Serving international customers was never a part of our business plan. Perhaps it was short-sighted, but it was never truly on the radar screen as a target-market. To serve this customer base and meet our standards of excellence, much work needs to be done. Chief among the tasks is to find shipping partners who can reliably and reasonably provide the goods to our customers. We also need to revise our web site to be friendly and able to accept information easily from our international customers. Finally we need to be able to commit extra time to communicating with these customers because they often have unique questions and issues that deserved to be addressed in a personal, responsive and caring way.
To be perfectly honest, addressing these issues is something that is on a very long list of growth activities. It is not currently a priority item for us. We believe that customers seeking tennis goods from the USA will be better served by tapping into the resources of our friends at Tennis Warehouse until we can commit the resources to serve this group of customers. Tennis Warehouse does have a staff and system that is capable of providing the services that tennis players abroad deserve.
Please watch our blog as we will update progress we make in being able to serve international customers in the future. Until then, we thank you for your understanding and most importantly your patience.
“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right!” – John 2008
