Moo.com are a great little printing company. I use them a lot for my business cards.

Yesterday, I took a few out of the box, and I realised that a few were damaged (the lamination was coming loose). So, I fired off an email to them , and within an hour I had an apology, and a replacement pack is on its was, free of charge.

I’m sorry your order didn’t come out as expected. This was a finishing error (when we laminate and cut your cards to size) and should have been spotted by our quality checkers.

I’ve re-processed your order, free of charge, and your reprinted items will be dispatched as soon as they are ready. Apologies for the inconvenience and any delays this might’ve caused.

No fuss, no hassle, just great customer service. By the way, these are the guys that print individual runs, whereby every card is unique.

2 orchids to moo.

Yes, believe it or not, Incredible Connection receives an orchid!

Last week, I bought a new camera bag from Incredible Connection, and after a few days the lining started to tear. So, off I went to complain. However I had lost the receipt, so I was a little worried about them giving me a refund.

When I arrived at the store, they were fantastic. Theywere friendly and helpful, they didn’t mind that I did not have a slip. They even managed to find my original purchase on their computer, and after a few minutes I had a full refund, no problems at all!

So, here is your orchid.

I had to unblock the SIM card on my Vodacom datacard, which should be a simple task; I had to phone the call centre twice, and navigate through menu’s nine levels deep to eventually get hold of a real person to assist me. When I eventually spoke to a human, she gave me great assistance and solved my problem in about 2 minutes. However it took me far longer trying to navigate my was through their system.

Wouldn’t it be nice if at the first menu they gave you an option to speak to a real person?

I just wish that customer-card would actually mean the care of the customers’ needs, and not just the cheapest and least labour intensive solution to your customer problems.

The worst part is that when you finally speak to a person, you are so grateful that somebody has actually answered the phone, that you don’t complain in case they disconnect you, and you can never find you way back through the labyrinth!

Well, at least it wasn’t the Multichoice call centre, where you have to speak to the voice recognition system that never quite manages to understand you.

2 Onions to all poorly run call centres!

The first orchid goes to the Malawian waiter from Jasers restaurant who called me after he arranged for a friend of his to bring us some Nali chilli sauce from back Malawi. Nali make the hottest peri peri sauce in Africa, and it is really good.

Anyway, we met him about six months ago when we were having drinks at Jaspers. We happened to mention how we love Nali sauce, and I gave him a business card. So, he kept it, arranged a couple of bottles, and I collected them last week. This was all for service sake, and for no benefit to him.

The second orchid goes to the training company that accidentally sent me their newsletter with my email address and about 100 other email addresses in the TO mail field. So they accidentally gave my email address to 100 other people. Now this is not why they received the orchid. That was onion behaviour!

They are receiving the orchid because after I complained, they made amends immediately. They offered to send me and anybody that I employee on their project management trainig course for free. This is a course that costs over R10000. Pitty they are in Johannesburg. I am not going to mention their name because they really messed up at first, but they were fantastic at resolving the problem.

It is good to know that there are still companies and people that are providing exceptional service, and that are doing their best to do right. These are the people that are going to perform and do well in the next few years.

A blogger is being sued for defamation by the RCI-affiliated Quality Vacation Club (QVC) for criticising it on his website Insights and Rants.

This is of huge interest to be, because I often write about good and bad service in my Orchids and Onions section of my blog site. Personally, I feel that if you don’t open your business to public scrutiny and comment, you should question your business practises and integrity very closely.

According to Independent Online,

Donn Edwards was phoned by a telemarketer last year and told that he had won a car. All he would have to do to claim his prize, he was told, was attend a prize-giving ceremony in Midrand, north of Johannesburg.

When he and his wife arrived at the venue, they discovered that the prize-giving ceremony was a QVC marketing presentation at which he and his wife, and the other “guests”, were told to choose a key, after the airing of a video, to determine if he had won the car. He had not.

Edwards wrote about his experience, and his unhappiness about being misled, on his blog.The result of this is that QCV are suing him for damages of R461 500.

Pamela Stein, a partner at legal firm Webber Wentzel Bowens, said the blogger would be able to defend his actions on the basis of fair comment.

“The right of fair comment, along with truth for the public benefit, is one of the fundamental rights of free speech,”

“I have no doubt that commentary that is in the consumer’s interests is in the public interest.”

It will be a very sad day if RCI win this court case. Freedom of expression, and the right to tell the truth are fundamental rights. If RCI are concerned about Donn’s views, they have every right to respond, to comment and to tell their side of the story. However, in my opinion, a large organisation suing a single person that is unhappy is not the approach to follow.

The full artice is on IOL.

The Facebook support group is here.

The amp for my hi-fi has been a little problematic, so I have been looking at upgrading it to a new one. My amp is quite a fancy one that connects to the DVD player, uses Dolby Surround sound etc, so the replacement gear is not cheap.

So, I have been spending time in the Hi-Fi shops, looking at what is currently available, and getting an idea of what sort of price I will need to pay.

One of our better Hi-Fi shops is Tafelberg Furniture, in Diep River, Cape Town. They have got three home-theatre rooms permanency setup, so you can go there any try out the different combinations of equipment.

I went there on Friday, and all the sales assistant were busy. So, I just went into one of the demo rooms and started playing with the equipment. Because there was nobody to help, I started doing things myself, connecting the different gear to my heart’s content.

I found a couple of receivers that interested me, but I wanted to find out more, so I took the gear out of the shelves, looked at the connections on the back, compared with other equipment etc. So, I looked like a little child playing with his lego blocks, spread out around him on the floor.

Do you know that during the entire time that I was there, not a single sales assistance came to see what

a) I was doing taking apart their home-theatre demo room or

b) see if they could assist me?

Bear in mind that I was not looking at cheap gear, you could easily (assuming you have the budget), walk out of that room R200,000 poorer. These were big ticket items that I was looking at, and nobody offered to assist.

Tafelberg, if you want to make the sale, get your staff into gear! One onion to you.

Tags: orchids and onions, tafelberg furniture

For her birthday, Lois wanted a new pair of sunglasses, so on Saturday morning, we went off to Spectacle Warehouse to see what we could find.

While Lois was looking at sunglasses, I tried a few pairs on myself, and I found a pair that I quite liked, but I wasn't really looking for me. Lois found a good pair of sunglasses that she wanted, and when I paid for them, they told me that they would give me the second pair that I had ben looking at – at no cost!

Now this did not happen before we had made a decision, so it was not an incentive to get my to buy. They were not running a 2 for 1 special. The sales assistant simply told me that we would have the second pair at no cost, just because she could!

That is what customer service is all about – !

• Did it cost them anything? – probably
• Will it build long-term customers? – yes
• Will we tell everybody about the great service? yes
• Did she have to do that? – no
• Will we be back? of course

Well done Spectacle Warehouse – three orchids to you.

Tags: orchids and onions spectacle warehouse

Recently, Lilly, who are one of the major manufactures of insulin, changed  he design of on of their insulin pens. One would think that a major pharmaceutical company would spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that the pens work fine, wouldn’t you? Apparently not! Take a close look at the images below.

Can you see how the needle on the top pen sticks out over the end of the closed en on the bottom? Yes, if you put a needle onto the insulin pen, the needle sticks out by about 3mm, and the cap is too short to fit onto the pen. So, you either have to switch to a shorter needle, or get a new pen!

Here you can see how the cap will not fit with the needle attached.

  Pretty poor design…

Two onions to Lilly!

Tags: orchids and onions Lilly insulin pen

About two weeks ago, I bought a USB memory stick from Chaos Computers in Kenilworth. The stick cost about R250. Well, get this – they gave me a courtesy phone call yesterday afternoon to check that all was fine and could they do anything to assist further.

No sales pitch, no special offers. Just a friendly call to check that all was ok. Well done, that is great customer service (their prices are also pretty good).

Two orchids to Chaos.

I ordered about 4 cases on wine from GetWine.co.za on Monday evening (after business hours). On Tuesday morning at 10:00am, the driver arrived at our house and dropped off the wine. And on top of that, they also gave us a free gift of a box of home-made chocolates.

That is just amazing customer service 12 hours from placing of the order to delivery – well done!

3 orchids to GetWine.

By the way, they have a pretty good selection of labeled and unlabeled wine at fantastic prices.