Trusting your customers
Occassionally I will create business cards and brochures for customers. It’s pretty easy since I usually have all of their information, logos and colors, but I prefer non-dead tree media.
The problem is finding a printer that is easy to work with and priced fairly. I ended up settling on Overnight Prints and until recently I’ve been happy. They have gotten slow, more expensive and putting advertisements on their web/email receipts.
In the last order a bunch of the cards were smudged, like the machine that stacked them rubbed the ink. My client wasn’t overly upset, it was only a few out of the 5,000 they ordered, but I went ahead and put in a request to see if I can get some reprinted.
Two weeks went by and I got a message that they will reprint 250 of them and I will need to send the bad cards back. I understand that they are just trying to prevent people from ripping them off, but really? Wouldn’t I say all of them were bad?
They could easily look at my account and see the thousand of dollars of cards I bought in the past and never did this. They can’t resell the cards, so shouldn’t they trust their customers just a little bit?
Comparing this experience to Amazon makes it feel in inadequate. I ordered a book as a gift around the holidays and UPS said they delivered it (left on door step), but it wasn’t there. I looked everywhere, called UPS and they said I can submit some paper work to get money back, but I’m better off calling Amazon.
I call Amazon and within 2 minutes they apologized and said they would overnight me another one, no questions asked and they would handle everything with UPS. I could have just made up this story and got 2 for the price of 1, but Amazon puts some trust into their customers to make the experience better.
This is why I order everything with Amazon and one of the reasons why I’m looking for a new printer. Any suggestions?