Facsimile is Retiring
This is the year the fax machine needs to retire. Not just the machine, which I haven’t used for awhile now in favor of an Internet faxing service, the whole idea of sending documents over a phone line.
The fax changed the way many companies did business. No longer did you need to mail official documents and wait days for them to arrive. Now you could send them instantly with a press of a button.
The Internet has replaced any need for a fax. I know what you are thinking, “But Chris, what about signed documents?” A fax machine is just a scanner that sends the documents over the phone line. Nothing is stopping anyone from scanning to a computer and emailing it instead.
So if you work one of those companies that are still living by a fax machine, please start accepting these documents by email. I would love to cancel my fax service by the end of the year so it can retire peacefully in Florida.
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?
Laziness will not get you through a recision
I’m amazed at the number of small businesses that ask me how to improve their business, then complain that it’s too much work. If you don’t have money to throw at the problem or aren’t willing to dedicate time, how do you expect to succeed?
Just showing up is not good enough anymore.