From time to time, all shops run into problems with orders. A screen breaks spilling ink all over a batch of expensive hoodies, and they somehow end up making it through quality control; a box is overlooked by your FedEx driver missing a client’s big event; a client approves a proof that was incorrect, but they still want you to take responsibility for it. The list goes on and on.
The good news is that while some people think getting the order right every time is the way to foster a long-time client, in my experience, it’s how we deal with these kinds of problems that really builds loyalty. Ask yourself this: With your favorite, longstanding client, have you never had any issues? Exactly!
How to Handle Customer Complaints in Your Print Shop
We’ve all been there. The client is on hold waiting for a response, or they are calling you over and over again. The phone’s incessant ringing is the heartbeat in the floorboards, adding anything but calm to a situation that’s already bleeding time and money. Everyone’s making the same micro-calculations. Can we just let this client go somewhere else? Will they order from us again even if we refund their entire order? And most important of all: who said what, when?
As a sales rep, I can’t count the number of timelines I’ve been forced to put together. Personally, I think this tactic is largely a waste. Sometimes your client just wants to bitch. And can you really blame them?
Maybe they are getting yelled at, and they need to seem like they have an appropriate amount of outrage. Maybe they know they messed up, but still need to vent or just want to be bailed out. Maybe they didn’t understand your process because you assumed since you’re an expert they should be too. Then again, maybe your company’s approval process has become overly cumbersome in the wake of years of adding countless disclaimers. Death by 1,000 cuts!
The only thing we know for sure is your customer wants to be heard, so be a partner, not an adversary. So what if the facts are in your favor? Who cares that they sent you the wrong art or didn’t read their emails? You’ll deal with that. First, listen. You don’t have to admit to any wrongdoing; what you can do, though, is agree the situation sucks. The shirts you sent aren’t what they had in mind, or the stitching isn’t as perfect as they wanted? Fair enough. Be an advocate. Maybe your client wants less than you think.
Recently a client reached out to me because when their order went south, after which their rep told them all of the ways it was, in fact, their own fault. They were about to leave and never come back. And do you know what they wanted? They just wanted someone to say, “Yeah, that does suck,” all teh more so because they knew full well they hadn’t read the proof before approving it—which if anything only served to make the situation suck even more!
Handle feelings first. If, for example, the situation can still be fixed, but the client’s venting is preventing you from handling what needs to be handled, most people will respond well to: “I want to let you vent, and we can absolutely do that after I go and handle XYZ. Right now, though, I can either fix this or let you vent. I can’t do both.”
Spoiler alert: I’ve never once had to schedule another vent session after using this approach!
Chicago-based Barrel Maker is a well-run shop that prides itself not just on the quality of its products, but its ability to handle any and all problems that may arise. Photo by courtesy of Barrel Maker
What to Say to an Unhappy Customer (Without Admitting Fault)
Before moving on to the various possible solutions out there, this might be a good time to reflect on the question, “What does ‘Making it Right’ mean to you?” Does it mean making the client happy at all costs? Does it mean just handling the part of the order you were responsible for? Think about these questions without drawing a line in the sand. As you’re doing so, consider the possibility the client is going to tell you something about the order their rep left out.
Personally, I always try and go into these conversations with an open ear and an open mind. Another question that often serves me well is asking the client, “What does making this right look like to you?” It’s often less than you think. Many people you think you’re going to need to refund an entire order for will actually be happy with as little as a 10-percent credit—that and some time venting with someone who isn’t the person they originally ordered from!
How to De-Escalate an Angry Customer in the Decorated Apparel Business
At my own shop, we make most of our customers really happy. I’m proud of our reviews, as they are a testament to our QC team, the processes we’ve set up on both the sales and production sides of the equation, and our great customer support team. Not only that, when problems do come up, it’s rare we can’t take an errant issue and turn it around in a way that makes the client a Barrel Maker (my company) loyalist.
That said, like everyone else we sometimes find ourselves having to deal with people who have other stuff going on. Maybe their boss is a narcissist? Maybe they’re letting their personal life dictate how they treat customer service people? Whatever it is, I can’t blame them. Ordering custom, high-end promo products is hard. There’s often a lot of money at stake. Sometimes people’s jobs are on the line, no matter the original cause of the issue in question.
Managing Emotions During Difficult Customer Conversations
When dealing with a conversation that’s rapidly escalating, or one in which I can feel my own heart rate increasing, I like to consider the concept of the “Triune Brain,” as proposed by American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. MacLean. The basic idea is that our brains include three main parts: the Reptile Brain, the Limbic System and the Neo Mammalian region.
The reptilian part of your brain is where aggression comes from. Dominance, territoriality and ritual displays originate here too, but we’re mostly talking aggression. The Limbic part, on the other hand, is responsible for emotion, while the Neo Mammalian area, your “thinking brain,” for want of a better word, is responsible for planning, language, abstraction and perception.
When we experience any kind of trauma (like getting yelled at) we often have reactions that pop up as part of those leftover aspects of our brains from before we became fully evolved. Maybe our ears ring, maybe our face gets flushed. Maybe we feel a need to somehow make ourselves seem smaller.
In the event you ever find yourself experiencing this kind of response, the first thing you need to do to deescalate the situation is be aware of what’s going on with you internally. Is your heart racing? Are your palms sweaty? In both cases, these are our bodies’ way of preparing our fight-or-flight response. Recognize this fact and move on—and don’t forget to breathe!
As for pulling the person you’re having a conversation out from their reptilian brain into their Neo Mammalian area, this can be a delicate process, one in which using context clues and being empathetic can be a huge help. A simple statement like, “Waiting two weeks for the garments and then their not being what you had in mind was probably really frustrating,” for example, can make all the difference in the world, as it makes them stop, think and feel like they are being seen. They may even tell you it wasn’t really that big a deal, that it was actually a whole other thing that was going on in their lives at the time. The goal here is to get them back into the part of their brain that handles language, planning and perception, as opposed to the part of the brain that runs on pure emotion.
Full disclosure, the Triune concept, a product of the ‘60s, is considered somewhat outdated these days. I’m also by no means an expert when it comes to this kind of thing. That said, it remains a fairly simple concept that works well if you want to get better at managing heated conversations. The thing to remember is you can’t really have a conversation about making things right if one of the people involved is being buffeted about by their emotions.
Something else to bear in mind: Don’t assume all your reps are equally capable of handling this kind of thing. Similarly, if your company has reached the size you personally no longer want to have to handle these kinds of clients and can afford to designate one or more of your reps with the job of focusing on your more important or difficult clients, by all means do so. You could also try having a kind of baffle, or pre-arranged system, by which issues like these can be moved to someone other than you. In some cases, the solution may simply be moving the client to a new rep.
When to Fire a Customer: Knowing When a Client Relationship Isn’t a Fit
Then, of course, there are those situations in which de-escalation not only doesn’t work, but you don’t see yourself ever making a particular client happy—situations in which you may have no choice but to sever the relationship. If it’s any consolation, I’ve heard from plenty of other shop owners who have had to make this call. Not only that, but as you may have also already discovered, often the biggest roadblock when it comes to this kind of thing is simply coming up with the right way of doing it.
How do we tell a client that we don’t want to work with them? How do we do so ethically and without causing a total PR nightmare? At Barrel Maker, the answer is we do it the same way we listen—with compassion and calm.
Recently, I had a client who needed 25 T-shirts. If I tell you there were more than three-times as many back and forth e-mails as there were shirts, I’m guessing many of you will have no problems believing me, because you’ve had this kind of client too!
Although a high email-to-shirt ratio can sometimes be a symptom of a rep kicking the can down the road, that was not the case here. Was the client using AI to bulk up his emails? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m pretty good at staying focused, but my eyes would invariably begin blurring reading his seemingly Russian novel length messages!
Not surprisingly, when the client received the 25 pieces he’d ordered, he wasn’t happy with the print quality. As fate would have it, he had not only requested water-based ink, which we are pros at, but a shirt make and model I had personally never heard of. Because it was his first order, we offered to re-do the entire thing for free and get the shirts right back to him. No great surprise, he still wasn’t happy.
Worse yet, as I looked back at the pictures he’d sent and pored over his dozens of emails, I still wasn’t clear what the problem was. Eventually, after the client’s rep and I had had a number of additional calls with this person, we made the decision our expectations of one another simply didn’t align. Again, though, when it came time for us to tell this client we thought it would be best if he took his business elsewhere, we made a point of doing so respectfully. Per the e-mail I sent him:
“I read some of the emails back and forth and it looks like the shirts didn’t meet your expectations, so sorry about that. Specifically with these shirts, or maybe this particular color match with water-based ink, I don’t know if we are a great fit for you, but we can definitely make you available for other vendors. Can we send you a label to get all of the shirts that we’ve printed for you back to us, and I can process the refund as soon as they arrive? How does that sound?”
In reply, I received a very kind (eight paragraph long!) email. The client wanted to set up another meeting. I respectfully declined. Interestingly, weeks later we still hadn’t received the shirts in question. Fair enough. More to the point, in terminating this particular relationship, we were able to move on to those clients for whom we print more shirts than exchange emails! It’s always a sad day to lose a client, but your time is better spent on a new client who can communicate effectively.
Growing up in the Punk Scene in Pittsburgh, PA, it didn’t take long for the DIY ethos to become permanently lacquered onto Zach Corn’s brain. Over the years, in addition to being VP of sales and service at Chicago-based Barrel Maker he’s worked with Apple, Threadless, Tee-Spring, CustomInk, Reebok, Nike, Adidas, GQ and countless others—and he still runs into something new every single day. If you ever want to chat about Pittsburgh, Chicago, punk rock, screen printing or customer service, e-mail [email protected].
