How *NOT* to do customer service

1. Start by telling your customer the work is not good enough. That the resolution will make it pixellated and that will look terrible.
2. Then say that the image has "keylines" that have to be removed and "crop lines" added "outside the trim area" - without explaining what they are
3. When your customer naiively asks what these mean, instead of explaining it - tell her that you haven't yet received the artwork because the only files they received don't have these things
4. When the customer says she sent files through and asks what is needed to change them into files that will meet their requirements (giving a detailed guess at what that might be), tell her again that you need these things - without explaining exactly what is needed or confirming that what she suggested is actually what you needed - even if she's later proved correct. Tell her that she is running out of time to get this done...
5. When your customer calls, make sure your receptionist (or colleague) answers, and that she tells your customer that you are with some other important client... and get *her* to also tell your customer that the artwork isn't good enough and go on at length about how it's such low resolution that it'll look all pixellated and low quality that it'll look terrible. Make sure she promises that you'll call her back before close of business.
6. When your customer has received no calls or emails and it's near close of business... and calls you. Answer immediately and...
   1. Begin by telling her off again at the low quality of the images (due to the resolution).
   2. When she mentions she thought you'd be calling her back, tell her you have *so* many other clients and you're very busy, you know...
   3. When she asks if you'll please just explain what she needs to do to add the crop lines - don't explain, tell her that you were expecting to speak with a designer who should already know these things.
   4. When she suggests that not all clients know the industry jargon of printing businesses and again asks for you to explain what to do, tell her to go and look up "crop lines" in the dictionary
   5. When she says that sometimes in your industry you have to deal with people that aren't specialists (she gives an example that if you'd asked her to set up a website, she wouldn't expect you to know what Rails, MySQL or AJAX were)... then tell her that you simply don't have time to explain to your customers how to add crop lines to an image, and that you only deal with designers that already know what crop lines are...

background...

We're launching our new startup this weekend (ie tomorrow) and needed new business cards ASAP. So my colleague called around the local while-u-wait business card dealers and found one that was willing to print and ship in time for tomorrow.

I'd quickly thrown together some business card images that were the exact size/shape required. They aren't brilliant, but they'll do for the weekend after which we can get some better ones done up.

I have a day-job... so while I'd love to go out and find out all about crop lines and trim-borders and whatever... I need to actually spend the day making money for my employer...

When I got off the final phone call and calmed down for a few minutes, I managed to find some time to go look it up. Apparently, all I need to do is exactly what I suggested in the reply to the second email - ie, expand the image size and add borders a little larger than where the old image-shape used to be... this would have taken him all of one minute to explain - just as it did me just now.

I recommend that you *don't* purchase from Kall Kwik 781 in Eton Street, Richmond

That doesn't help me, it helps you

I just got off the phone with Australia Post and I'm not happy. Even though they were very polite to me, they failed to provide a good customer service experience. This issue requires a bit of backstory.

While in Melbourne last weekend, I'd bought two half-cases of wine and paid for them to be delivered. I have no car, so I left explicit instructions for the parcels to be left on the back doorstep if I was not at home.

I got one of the little blue cards in the post yesterday, telling me that they tried to deliver one of the parcels to me in the 1 hour when I was out of the house getting some lunch. I figured that the winery must have forgotten to put the "in case not at home" message on the parcel, so today I decided to just fetch it from the post office.

I damaged my knees fencing, a couple of years ago, so walking eight blocks while carrying a heavy box is painful for me. My arms and knees both ache, now, but I got the parcel home... only to find a second little blue card in the mailbox.

The parcel from yesterday clearly has the "in case not at home" instructions printed on the outside, so I figured I'd call up Australia Post and see if they could actually do what I paid them to - which is to deliver my second parcel to my house.

I called them up and waded through their long telephone menu-system to get to a real human being. The man at the other end seemed kind enough, but the only option available to him was to allow me to lodge a complaint against the contractor who failed to follow the given instructions.

I don't really want to lodge a complaint - I just wanted my parcel delivered - which is what I paid for.

I asked the man if he could find anyone that would be able to help me get what I wanted. He went back to his supervisor, leaving me on hold, and returned to tell me that the only way I could get it redelivered was to call up the people that I originally bought it from (some winery out in the Yarra valley - I don't know which one as the parcel is still sitting in the aussie post office), and to get *them* to call aussie post and figure out if their contract supports "redelivery-on-failure"...

Good grief! From my POV it's pretty simple:

1. I paid for delivery to my home
2. Aussie Post stuffed it up
3. Aussie Post should find a way to get it right

Instead of finding a way to get my parcel to me, they kept insisting that they were helping me by starting up a complaints process and making sure it "never happens again". If you want to reprimand your contractor, that's your business. It will help you improve your own processes over time, and no doubt his non-instruction-following is the weak link that broke in this particular chain of events...

But doing this isn't going to help me. Getting my parcel to me helps me - that's all I want, and Aussie Post wasn't willing ot help in that regard. I was a customer on the line right then and there with a problem that Australia Post caused - and wasn't able to get any resolution that actually solved that problem.

I was left with the feeling that Australia Post wasn't willing take responsibility for this mistake and do something about it. Instead they wanted to shift the blame to the contractor, and then claim that responsibility was out of their hands.

This reeks of bad customer service.

If you want to leave a good impression with your customers, follow one of the basic rules of human conduct: if you stuff up, take responsibility and try to fix it. Whatever you do, don't just give a reassurance that it won't happen again... we won't believe you. After all, you've just proven that you can't be trusted. At least if you try to find a way to give me what you promised in the first place - it'll go a long way towards reassuring me that you can act in good faith.