Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Great Customer Service

After a recent event where I saw a number of other “geeks” sporting stickers on their laptops, I decided to join the trend.

I Google’d for stickers, and the first result was from StickerGiant. They had a nice site, I answered a few questions and got to a contact form. Typically I don’t like that, especially as most of these products are commodities. There’s no value in involving a salesman since one site is the same as others.

I was out of town, didn’t want to research a lot, so I filled it out and moved on. I checked a couple other places as well, noted a few prices, but didn’t order anything. No one had a great interface like VistaPrint, so I put this on my to-do list and moved on.

A day later I got a quote from StickerGiant that seemed OK, but I wanted to check more prices, so I let it sit until I got home. The next week I was working on this and checked a few prices from 2-3 other places and compared with StickerGiant. Their prices were as good as anyone, they already had my logo, and so I replied to the salesperson saying I wanted to proceed. Inside of 10 minutes I had a reply asking for color matches, address, and how I’d like to pay. I replied saying I’d like an online payment method and gave my address. I said make a standard color match since I’m not sure that a Pantone match of my logo matters. Actually I have no idea if we’ve ever matched with the products we’ve ordered, and I didn’t want to start now.

I got a reply saying that I needed to pick the colors from their list with a link to the site and then a minute later an invoice link in a separate email. I clicked the invoice, it had my information in there and then a “pay now” button that took me to a place for my CC info. I entered that, got a confirm, sent my color choices and the salesperson confirmed I’d have stickers in 4 business days.

All together that process took less time than writing this post, and while I wasn’t sure a salesperson added value, they definitely made the process smoother.

I have no idea how many people one salesperson can handle, or if this is part time work for someone doing other tasks, but this was a smooth process and it worked well. In fact, I think I’ll order other stickers.

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