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.

I received an e-mail the other day from a woman named Kathee. Kathee was irked because without realizing it, when we updated the site a few months ago we inadvertently left off what city the studio is located in. I still can’t believe I made such a rookie mistake. I am genuinely grateful to Kathee for taking the time to let me know. I think most everybody who reads the blog regularly knows it, but I’ll state it again for the record: 989 Design is located in Bay City, Michigan. We are located at 701 E. Midland Street, in the heart of Bay City’s historic Midland Street business district. 

I think what really bugs me about the omission is that sites who leave out that sort of information is a real pet peeve of mine. There are a lot of business sites which deliberately leave out location information. I really don’t understand the rationale behind it, but I suppose they think it makes them seem like a bigger business than they really are.

For example, somebody mentioned a business in Saginaw (whose name I will not divulge, I’m not trying to be nasty I’m just using them to illustrate my point) and I had never heard of them before, so I looked them up online. If you go to the site and read through it, you would think that it’s this giant business employing scores of people. Everything is written in this really silly, puffed-up style. “Our team of experts” and stuff like that. In reality, it is one person operating out of their home. 

For years people have been saying that the internet is a great equalizer and that it levels the playing field for small business. I suppose that is true, to a certain extent, but I can’t help but wonder why people think it’s so important to look big. Personally, I think that being a small business gives you a big advantage, especially given the current economic climate. I like the idea of being more nimble and better able to respond to client needs because I don’t have the same overhead as a big studio.

Granted, there are times when being a small studio excludes you from certain jobs and clients. For certain projects, size really does matter. You need the manpower to keep up with the demands of a big client. These clients are few and far between, though. For every client like Hulu.com, who recently awarded their $50 million account to a new agency, there are hundreds of clients with much smaller budgets, but the demands of these accounts are easier to keep up with as a small studio. I think that one of the most important things you can do with your website is to be sure that it accurately reflects what your business is all about.

Also, remember to put what city you are located in.