Margie Dana

Last week my column focused on specific traits or facts about a printing company that make it stand out. They’re perfect for featuring in marketing campaigns to help differentiate you from all the other printers out there.

They help get you attention.

Once you have someone’s attention, and they become a customer, what they focus on is totally different: your products and services. More and more, it’s how you interact with customers. Call it customer service. Call it the customer experience. Whatever you call it, you must pay strict, daily attention to it.

If your customers' experience with you stinks, they’ll think about replacing you.

Today’s Print Tip is written by a print buyer who expresses this situation particularly well. He's no novice. He has seven years of experience. Before that, he worked in a print shop and as a graphic designer for a total of nine years.

Have a look at his take on customer service in the print industry.

Printers need to quit making sales pitches and start making service pitches. These days, just about any shop out there can get an Indigo and start spitting out high-quality variable data on it. But showing how they support their product is where they can stand out among their competition.

So, from the perspective of a buyer, what can printers do to stand out? Let's start at the beginning.

Estimates should be checked, double-checked, and maybe even triple-checked before going out. Questions and suggestions are welcome and anticipated, and can even be learning experiences for both parties. Nobody in my position should ever have to question the prices on a bid, because it should be complete and correct before it leaves the shop. It can do serious damage to my credibility as a print buyer among my coworkers if I present a price to a decision maker and then have to go back and inform them it's incorrect. And, if I ask you to take a little off the price, it's not because I'm being cheap. It's because I want to work with you on the job, not a competitor who came in lower.

While you're carefully checking your estimates, check the other details in your communications. On every email I have received from a particular printer, they have spelled my name incorrectly. Something like that isn't going to make me very confident in their attention to details and instructions.

This next point can apply to both before and during the run of a job. How quickly are my phone calls and emails returned, and how thoroughly are my questions answered? Everyone's stressed out and doing the jobs of at least two people now, so I'm pretty reasonable with this one. But it should never take more than one business day (or three hours for a live job) to return a call or email, and no print buyer should ever have to chase you down for an answer. I take being ignored as a sign of disinterest, and I'll take my business elsewhere accordingly, and perhaps permanently. Even if the answer is, “I don't know at the moment,” that's fine. Don't leave buyers hanging.

Honesty and thoroughness can go much further than a can-do attitude. I once had to spec and bid a fairly complicated job and, as I expected, most vendors turned it down. One jumped at the chance, and I spent the better part of a day coming up with a mockup and instructions that included measurements of every possible dimension, to which they confidently replied they could handle it. Well, they couldn't. And when did they inform me of this discovery? When they put the job on press. Yes, you read that correctly. On press. Had they thoroughly reviewed the job and been honest with me—and themselves—instead of feeding me the company line, maybe I'd be doing business with them today.

Regarding the proof, let me know when to expect it, and after sending it out, drop a line to check. For an extra bonus, have your CSR review the proof before it goes out. Is it complete and accurate? I've received proofs that were neither, and even proofs for other customers, causing me to excuse the delay and mistake to my coworkers, which is embarrassing and frustrating at the best of times.

Once the job is progressing, if there's a problem that for any reason is going to delay final delivery by more than half a day, let me know ASAP what the trouble is. Bad weather? Busted equipment? Power failure? Truck broken down? Print buyers are pretty understanding. Just let me know what is being done to correct it, and when the job is expected to go out once things are cleared up. If it's rush job on a tight deadline, a contingency plan on the printer's part is a display of professionalism and initiative that can build huge and long-term trust and confidence in a print buyer.

If the end result is not what I anticipated, or there are problems with it, how willing are you to proactively address the problem? Will there be a discount? A quick resolution? A system put in place to ensure it doesn't happen again? More thorough quality control? Or, best of all, a combination of the above that a printer can present to me to rebuild my confidence?

So, in a nutshell, the keys to service are careful and honest communication, diligence, initiative, and dedication to product quality. A print buyer can only be as good at their job as their last printer, and if you've done something that makes me look bad to my coworkers, customers and boss…well, what would you do in that situation?