Customer Service = Care
Each year I'm asked what kind of cake I want for my birthday. Each year I pick the same thing: vanilla cake, strawberry filling and whipped topping from a small bakery in town.
This bakery has been losing business for years. You could blame it on the economy or the fact that other places have popped up selling bagels AND breakfast sandwiches. But I think it's something else. I think Gary Vaynerchuk says it best about customer service. Care.
When you take an order for vanilla, write down vanilla and hand someone this, maybe you just don't care anymore.
I'm not that picky when it comes to cake, but next year, I'll ask for a cake from somewhere else.
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?