I’ve said it before and I will keep saying it: YOUR LOGO IS NOT YOUR BRAND. Your brand is everything—EVERYTHING—that is a part of your business. Sure, your logo is definitely the most visible, but there is so much more to it and this includes customer interactions.

Recently I had an experience with Staples that served to reinforce the notion of employees being a vital part of your brand. I had to prepare some comps for a client meeting and sent them to Staples to have them printed. Generally, I use Staples for this sort of work because they have high-quality color printers, produce the work relatively quickly and aren’t too expensive.

I have had a few bad customer service experiences with Staples print center, mostly due to the inexperience of some of the people working there. By and far, though, my experience with the Bay City location has been positive.

On this particular order, though, I sent the files with EXPLICIT instructions, in hopes of avoiding any issues. The girl working at the copy center called me to confirm the order and that she would have them done very quickly. I went to pick the order up and it was wrong. The files, which were larger than 11″ x 17″, needed to be reduced to fit the page, but they were printed at full size and parts of the pages were cut off. The Staples co-worker told me that what I asked for couldn’t be done. I was really annoyed to have to pay $10 for work that was wrong, but the co-worker couldn’t fix it.

I was probably a little more curt with her than I would like to be, but I was furious. I had an 8AM meeting the next day and had to show up with bad proofs. The girl working there felt bad for me and talked to her supervisor (who was not in the store while I was there). The supervisor took it upon herself to call me and let me know that it was an easy fix and that the girl who ran the prints just needed to push one button. The supervisor offered to reprint everything for me and have it ready for me to pick up in the morning. I explained that I needed the prints an hour before they opened and she talked to the store manager—who comes in before 8AM—and told him what was going on.

She called me back and gave me the manager’s phone number so that I could come at 7:30, call him and pick up my proofs in time for my meeting. The supervisor’s follow-through was really impressive. And when I picked up the prints in the morning, the manager was both very friendly and very apologetic. By this time, all had been forgiven. Staples really did make up for their screw up and by going out of their way to make sure that I had what I needed, they reinforced what I already feel about them.

When I was a general manager for kinko’s (sorry FedEx, but I can’t bring myself to call it FedEx Office), we were at a managers meeting (in Austin or Cincinnati, I think) and we reviewed a customer service case study. The point of the study is that customers actually have a higher opinion of customer service from companies who have screwed up and recovered. Because this was almost 20 years ago, I can’t remember the actual figures, but the way it works out is that if you consistently perform very well, customers’ opinions stay equally constant. If you make a mistake and recover from it, overall approval ratings end up higher than if you had never made a mistake.

Staples is a great example of this very thing. Because they stretched themselves a bit to make sure that my needs were met, I really think very highly of their customer service. I was never going to boycott them or anything like that, but I’d be less inclined to go there if I need something. As of now, though, I will have no such hesitation.

Good save, Staples.

Our January winner for bad customer service is Staples in Bay City. 

I had to run into Staples to have something laminated. While I was at picking up and paying for my order at the copy center desk, I told the girl working behind the counter that I needed to buy five sheets of 11″ x 17″ paper. Simple request, right?

Me: “Do you have 11″ x 17″ paper in colors?”

Staples co-worker: “Yes.”

“Can I have five sheets on the ivory or the cream?”

“We don’t have it in stock…we have to special order it.”

Didn’t I just ask if you had it? Did she think I was inquiring as to whether or not such 11″ x 17″ colored paper existed? 

“Okay…that’s not a problem. Do you have it in stock in white?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Can I have five sheets of that?”

“Um…okay…um…we don’t…um…we can’t really sell you five sheets like that. There isn’t a way that we can ring it into our system.”

You would think I was asking her to sell me her shoes or something. Even now when I think about it I have to shake my head in disbelief. There are several options she had, any of which would have worked out better than her response. She could have decided to:

1. Sell me the paper as if it were 5 copies. Easy. Problem solved. 

2. Give me the paper for free. It’s five sheets of paper…they cost you next to nothing. It creates goodwill with a regular customer.

3. Almost anything other than stand there like a deer in the headlights, stammering about point-of-sale systems.

My last job with Kinko’s was as a regional trainer, handling customer service classes. This is Customer Service 101, Staples. Hire people who can solve problems, rather than create them. I’ll still shop at Staples for supplies sometimes, but from now on my print work will probably end up elsewhere.

These days I frequently hear people blathering on about branding, but the truth is that very few people really have any idea what branding is. It’s not your logo, it’s not your tagline–it’s everything. Including—especially in service businesses—the people who man your registers. In a micro environment like a small city where word of mouth carries a lot of weight, who you hire says more about you than your logo ever will.