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Over the last decade, I’ve watched the business world go very polar in the extremes of customer service. Every time I talk to fellow business owners at any form of networking or subsequent 1-1, the one resounding point is service. Something which the small business world seems to have caught a massive leap over the big box shifting internet sheds.

The simple phrase people like people is at the heart of the small business, we trade with people we like, equally with people of similar values. People understand each other and flex accordingly to meet each other desires. Even Maslow touches upon this in his hierarchy of needs. So the un-educated who drive their transactions only on simplistic reasoning of price, miss the core premises of the underlying intrinsic premise of support, service and satisfaction – I struggle to find an online example which does this truly well.

One point which truly shocked me, was when a professional service provider, a one-man band, said, I need your documents uploading to the portal. This word, portal defines to me bad customer experience, you’re just another number, ticket, automated action, all of which are synonymous with big we don’t value you, internet online businesses.

Go back to my grandparents, they experienced great customer service, and they felt that their hard-earned money was appreciated in their local communities. What makes me say this, they knew their butcher, who would advise and treat them as individuals, they would go in the Co-op and they would be known, their “divvy” would bring them back to spend again as they had a relationship / tie with the organisation/business.

Even if I look back a few decades, in the print business, we had substantially more tied/committed business, purely down to the management of relationships. Interestingly we won business recently, producing a calendar, purely on the ground of how we handled the enquiry, provided answers, questioned their needs. All of this is not an online process-driven, but an individual pathway, from experience and a desire to deliver. The customer said he was put off by the levels of automation. 

The larger the business the greater the need for automation, which is great, but it strips away service and added value that brilliant staff often provided. After all, Richard Branson is renowned for using the phrase look after your staff and they will look after your customers. Which is bang on true. However, we are talking about individuals here, and unfortunately not clone-able. I’ve seen it in many medium-large businesses, who say everyone is replaceable, however, some people require multiple people to step into special shoes of skilled practitioners of customer service.

Capping it off, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. 2020 has shown us that service and support do drive good business, perhaps if you believe in a better pedigree of service, you know where to go.

Back in the early 1990’s WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) was the buzz acronym. The mantra of this probably rings truer today than ever before. Not with desktop publishing, where the acronym came from, but in sales and product delivery. Today it seems ever more so that that this definition has slipped. But yet it is true. Is it the fact we now have a generation who expect anything?

Or is it that the realisation of service, attention to detail, not feeling like a ticket number in a virtual queue, drives more value than the face value of a product? In an industry where yes you can buy product stupidly priced online, is the satisfaction there? We have refused from the beginning to allow ourselves to be pushed into this arena. It simply doesn’t work for us. We actively encourage a positive relationship, where understanding our customers is paramount to us growing what we do.

Asking questions about what you want with your print provides us with the opportunity to ensure you get the right product or right service. Last week the print gods aligned some great examples of why starting with the words of “the price is…” really don’t pay.

True story, we accept that clients will look around, and will place print elsewhere. Needless to say, a call at 12 noon of a Friday with… “we’ve been let down, can you…” really drives home what we do. Less than 18 hours later their job was ready for collection. Yes, it was a rush premium job, yes, we had to get a same-day drop from one of paper merchants to print the job, yes, we stopped well into the evening to get the job done. Points of learning, given more notice, we could control the costs, thus bringing it in more on a sensible budget. So why did they place it elsewhere, who knows (they do) I suspect a rock bottom cheap price.

Another true story… After 2-3 years of courting a prospective client, they have recently come on board, I’m hopeful they will stay on board with us. However, we found that our attention to detail asking questions about their brand, understanding their pitch to their clients, resulted in a job, which has shifted perceptions of what they can do with print. It’s also made them question a lot of the content they use on social media.

Regardless of what you do, the end result is the key. Return on investment yes is important. The right planning, ensuring you get what you want when you need to deliver a project is key. Longevity and method are more significant than a cheap hit which doesn’t understand your needs from being a number in a virtual queue. So perhaps the wise print buyer knows that a low-ticket price doesn’t fully deliver everything and “What You DON’T See Is What You Get”