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Is Your Content in Sync with Your Customer Service? A True Story

By Joe Pulizzi | Published: December 3, 2008

The following events are true and not exaggerated. I believe it’s important to understand that great information, without customer service execution and web usability, undermines trust more than even an absence of information.  Here’s the story.

November 18th
My procurement officer alerts me that we haven’t decided on what to do for our holiday cards this year. Need to get going.

November 23rd
Count and concept finalized. Ready to get into production and find a printer.

November 25th
Talk about perfect timing and information.  OvernightPrints.com (who I used last year to produce my business cards and stationary) sends me an email (I opted in to their list) that says I can get holiday cards for 30% off and that I shouldn’t waste time mailing them. Why not?  Well, because they’ll do that for me, and include it all in one great bundle.  Lovely. Where do I sign? Here’s the email.

November 26th
My designer, Joe Watson from Saremo, touches off the final design to our holiday card (illustration by Scott High at 3DVision Technologies).

November 30th
Go to upload the designs as specified on the Overnight Prints website. Problem – the images won’t upload. It says I didn’t format them correctly.

I try again, first outside, then inside, then inside, then outside.  How about just one side? No luck. I check the specs…yes, they’re right.

I call customer service. After the pressing 2 and then 1, I get put on hold. Five minutes later, I get cut off. Crap.

I call again. 12 minutes and still on hold. Now this is getting interesting. I hang up.

I email customer service at 4:11 PM EST (this is the actual message):

“Hello…I’m trying to upload the attached into your greeting card upload, but it says my specs are not right, but I believe they are.  Can you help?”

NOTE: I realize that it was Sunday, so I look past all this and focus on a fresh new Monday.

Monday, December 1st
Tried calling two more times again.  First one lasted about three minutes before it disconnected me, then I waited about 10 minutes the second time. Since this was becoming an experiment, I actually wanted to set the phone down and see how long it took, but I had a hunch no-one was going to pick up.

Sent another email at 3:10 PM EST:

Subject line only: “Trying to call but I cannot connect with anyone. Help!”

Then thought maybe I had the wrong address, so I went to their contact form on the web page and filled that out as well.

Tuesday, December 2nd
I finally get a call from someone at Overnight Prints. When I saw the caller ID come up I was actually excited. She asked if I had contacted them and needed help with a project.

“Yes,” I said.  “I’m so happy to speak with a real person from your organization. I thought you went out of business.”

She said they had a long backup of calls and emails to follow up over the weekend, so they were sorry this took so long.  Okay, I can believe that.  Don’t like it, but can believe it.  NOTE: If you don’t have customer service available on the weekends, let the caller leave a message or tell them to call back during regular hours.

I explained my situation and she said that their production staff would look into my issue right away and get back to me immediately.  Excellent.  Now I’m all better.

Received an email about two hours later from Overnight Prints customer service. Lisa from Overnight Prints tells me that their online uploader is having technical difficulties and that she’s sorry. She doesn’t say when things will be working, but some communication is better than nothing.  Let’s see what happens.

Wednesday, December 3rd
It’s afternoon and I’m getting worried.  I really wanted to get the cards out this week and this delay is unexpected to say the least.

So, I try calling customer service again.  This time I wait about eight minutes with no answer.

I send what is to be my final email at 2:54 PM EST:

“Hi…I really need to get these done.  If I can’t upload them by tomorrow, I’ll have to go somewhere else.  I really don’t want to.  Help!”

Calling the CEO
As a small business owner, I actually want to talk to the CEO on this one.  If I was the CEO of Overnight Prints, I certainly would like to hear from a customer that really wants to buy but can’t.

So, I type in “Overnight Prints CEO” into Google.

What do you know?  The first two entries are complaints and mostly negative feedback about Overnight Prints. Do they know that? They have Pay-Per-Click all over the place, so I’m assuming they do (and yes, I know what they say about assuming).

Anyway, after reading entry after entry about the deplorable customer service at Overnight Prints, one person who gave negative feedback actually put the CEO’s name and contact information in their review. So, I call Brett Heap, presumably the CEO.

The number seemed to go to the main switchboard.

“Hi, I’d like to talk with Brett Heap please.”

I can hear her cover the phone and yell to someone next to her. “Is Brett hear today?” “No,” someone responds. “Just send him to marketing.”

So, without another word, she sends me to marketing. There was no answer, and I reached mailbox number 524. I didn’t leave a message.

After hanging up, I sent an email to my regular printer, who is a bit more expensive, but always reliable.

Content Can Not Be King without Customer Service

Anyone who reads this blog knows how I feel about creating relevant, valuable and compelling information. I believe it’s a necessity to survive in our new content marketing world.

That said, all the great content in the world won’t save a brand that can’t execute on its promises.

What can you do? If I had to guess, I’d say that Overnight Prints has one person running the marketing and another person running customer service. How can marketing and sales do their job without an integrated support team to keep the promise that marketing makes.

Check your structure. Now is the perfect time (during a stressful economic environment) to reorganize around your customers – and giving someone ownership over what the customer sees, hears and “feels”.

For those expecting a holiday card this year, hopefully you’ll get them in a few weeks.

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  • http://www.nxtbook.com Jeff Martin (Nxtbook Media)

    Hi Joe, what about a digital holiday card, we be happy to help out. We are getting ready to launch ours next week.

  • http://www.annhandley.com Ann Handley

    This story made me really tense… it *oozed* your frustation! But in the end, it illustrates a great point: “Content Can Not Be King without Customer Service.” Nice, Joe!

  • http://profile.typekey.com/jpulizzi/ Joe Pulizzi

    @Jeff Let’s talk
    @Ann Yep, still a bit frustrated. Most of all, I just don’t understand. Why in the world would a business run itself like that. Learned my lesson I guess.

  • http://braintraffic.com Kristina Halvorson

    Dude. Overnight Prints sucks. We tried ordering “overnight” from them – the morning we expected their delivery, we got an email (with no reply address or phone number) saying we could expect our shipment in three days.
    “All the great content in the world won’t save a brand that can’t execute on its promises.” Preach it!

  • http://suddenlyfrugal.blogspot.com Leah Ingram

    Joe:
    Nice post. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a nearly identical experience, though you kept after the company for much longer than I think most would have–probably because of your interest in customer service.
    At least some bad customer service stories have a happy ending.
    I recently had an incident with a baked goods catalog company that has always done right by me, but this time they screwed up big time. Well, customer service was down over the weekend (when I discovered the mistake) but at least their website was working. Without too much effort, I was able to find a direct email address to customer service, so I sent my message about the screw up and how frustrating it was not to have customer service available on the weekend. Lo and behold, they called bright and early on Monday a.m. to share their apologies and see how they could fix things. Within six hours, everything was all good, they retained me as a customer, and now I will continue to only have good things to say about them. The company, by the way, is Dancing Deer. And I have no financial affiliation with them.
    Leah

  • http://profile.typekey.com/jpulizzi/ Joe Pulizzi

    @Kristina…Amen
    @Leah…thanks for sharing. See, most reasonable people understand a few hiccups. Continual issues make them run!

  • http://sparknewthinking.blogspot.com Mark Henson

    Wow. What a story. And what a frustration! They obviously have failed to create systems that help them serve the sheer number of customers they have. Serving customers well is all about creating consistency. You can’t do that without great systems in place. You also can’t do it without constantly training your staff and setting (and re-setting) the bar. As usual, though, it sounds like it comes from the top.

  • Susan

    I just had a similar experience. I am co-chairing an Event for my Synagogue – a dinner. The invitation had a nice picture on the outside and the details of the dinner on the inside. I also had trouble uploading the file to their site so I spent hours on hold and then working with the “Service” people at Overnight Prints to get everything right. I wound up sending them my graphics and text in a TIFF and PDF and in jpg so that they could help me out. They were helpful, I thought. They were even good enough to offer to ship 1st day air if I paid for 2nd day air which I thought was very nice. But the order was finalized on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the cards arrived yesterday(ten days later – not exactly “overnight.” ) The outside looked OK (though there was some undesirable white space). But on the inside, instead of the details of the dinner, it said “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year” and below “Your signature here”. So obviously totally unusable. The event is in early January, so our plan was to get them in the mail this coming Monday. The soonest they can get us a reprint is next Friday which is way late. So I asked them about paying for me to have a rush job at Kinkos. You’d think they would want to make good on a commitment to a customer at any cost. But no, that’s not their policy. (Good customer service is NOT their policy). So we are getting a credit for our order and will have to punt at this point. I also tried to get the name of the CEO, so I’m glad to know someone has figured it out. I would never use them again.

  • NWGuy

    Obviously the company is not listening. Could you just confirm again, have you heard anything back from them in response to your original issue or the blog writeup?

  • http://blog.junta42.com Joe Pulizzi

    Hey NW…yes, I did hear back. The customer service group adjusted the files the next day and sent them back. Although I already decided not to use the service, I wanted to see if it worked.
    I went in and they uploaded fine…but when I went to upload the mailing list, I received an error. Then I went to call customer service…guess what? No answer. Go figure.
    Have a happy holiday!

  • http://freebusinesscardbailout.com Free Business Card Bailout

    A current bailout for small businesses from overnightprints.com is available at freebusinesscardbailout.com where you can get 500 free business cards just pay S&H.