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Editor's Note: If you missed Dave Fellman's webinar in February about navigating away from price during the sales cycle, you missed a good one! But you can watch the recording by logging into the APDSP Members Center and finding the webinar on the left side under the Member Tools tab.
By Dave Fellman
In my last article for the APDSP Newsletter, I started a series on The Top 3 Way Printers Lose Customers: Quality Failures, Service Failures and Contact Failures. That article dealt specifically with Quality Failures. This month, Service Failures are the topic of discussion.
So how do you avoid losing customers over service failures? It’s largely the same recipe as with quality failures: don’t have them in the first place—a combination of training and quality control, with a measure of good management thrown into the mix—and if you do, be sure to do whatever damage control you can in an effort to minimize the damage to your customer relationship.
It’s important to remember, though, that there’s more to the definition of service failures than late deliveries. It’s also far too common for printers to suffer from the quality of their service (or more correctly, from the lack thereof.) Poor communication and sloppy order entry and inadequate attention to detail are the common culprits here, and again, this is a problem that can only be solved with training and management. Remember that quality control policies and procedures are just as applicable to the quality of the service as to the quality of the finished product.
Buy Time!
There’s something else that you can do to minimize the likelihood of missed deliveries, and that’s to buy time at every opportunity. If you’re smart, you’ll never tell a customer that they’ll have their job on some specific day based on your “normal” turnaround time. What you’ll do instead is ask them “When do you need this?” If the answer is something longer than your normal turnaround time, you say “We should be able to do that” and if it turns out that you can deliver the job sooner, you’ve set up a situation where you’ve under-promised and then over-performed. That’s always a good thing!
If their deadline is the same as your normal turnaround time, you say essentially the same thing but with one important addition. “We should be able to do that,” you say. “But if it comes down to needing another day or so, would that still be OK?” The extra day or so may not always be there, but if it is, you want it!
If their deadline is shorter than your normal turnaround time, you say “I’ll have to check our production schedule to make sure we can meet your deadline, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I do that.”
Please remember that every “rush” job that gets plugged into the production schedule is going to affect every job in line behind it. To put that another way, when you accept a rush job to make one customer happy, you’re generally taking a chance on making some other customer(s) unhappy. The benefit of this strategy is that the time you buy on any other order increases the likelihood that you’ll be able to handle the rush job or any other calamity (equipment breakdowns, employees out sick, etc.) without jeopardizing your relationships with other customers.
Next Time: Contact Failures
Dave Fellman is the president of David Fellman & Associates, Cary, NC, a sales and marketing consulting firm serving numerous segments of the graphic arts industry. Contact Dave by phone at 919-363-4068 or by e-mail at dmf@davefellman.com. Visit his website at www.davefellman.com.