Have We Lowered our Expectations As Customers?

Periodically, we send out surveys to some of our customers and potential customers to find out what their priorities are and what they expect from their print vendors. Our last survey was pretty surprising. We listed four factors (price, customer service, overall quality of produced materials and turn time) and asked the respondents to rate the items in order of importance for determining which vendor to work with. Surprisingly, customer service was rated the factor of least importance.

We suggested in one of our newsletters that perhaps the reason people don’t make customer service one of their priorities is because they've come expect poor service if any at all. How often do you anticipate an unpleasant experience when making a call to a company’s customer service department? Do you expect to get taken advantage of sometimes because it’s happened to you before? I know I do.

Some people have the idea that the number one reason a company exists is to produce a profit; they're willing to lower not only their own standards but their customer's as well, simply to increase their bottom line. I, on the other hand, believe that companies exist to provide solutions to a problem; to increase the overall quality of people's lives. Boldy put, why even have a business if you're only going to make people angry? That sounds like a pretty poor business model to me.

We're hoping that by providing the highest quality of customer service possible we can help maintain our customer's standards for service and encourage people to not settle for anything mediocre. Being a primarilly B2B provider, we understand how hard our customers work and we sincerely enjoy making their lives a little easier. We've been on your side of the table, we are on your side of the table and we won't work with vendors who don't beat our expectations. You shouldn't either.

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