2) Color miscommunication
Quite often the customer provides a disk with his graphic file on it. Unfortunately the customer didn’t send along a color proof to verify the color accuracy in the file. It looked great on the screen to us and so we printed the file, but the customer didn’t like it – to our surprise.
3) Carelessness
The work order wasn’t written up correctly or that extra little time wasn’t taken to carefully go over the work order with the customer to ensure that what he wanted would be clearly expressed to the designer.
4) Inventory Mismanagement
Often we run our business with no stock on hand because we don’t want to invest in materials until we actually get the job. Now this is understandable, but it may cause us grief later on if we can’t get the materials right away and now the customer’s job will be delayed.
Here are some suggestions to helping alleviate any of the above problems –
Lack of information – Some sales people are afraid to suggest to the customer a proper solution because they don’t want to tell the customer what to order, especially if they seem to have made up their mind on a specific product. These salespeople are really just order takers and without directing the customers to the best solution, problems may arise afterwards. The salesperson’s job is to translate the client’s need into a practical solution. Allow the customer to define his need and ask for constant clarification.
Color miscommunication – Color miscommunication is a big thing now a days.
With the current shift to direct digital printing it is all important to give the client a color proof of his job before continuing to print his complete job. It is now possible to profile the press and bring the profile back to the RIP to calibrate it for exacting output to the proofer. We have been very successful combining Best/EFI Colorproof RIP with the Epson Pro Graphics inkjet printers. When a color technician sets this up correctly, we can achieve 95% accuracy on the proof. Now that’s worth signing off on.
Carelessness
There’s nothing worse than then a carefully written work order that doesn’t get completely read by everyone down the line. This is especially true when dealing with specialty colors. (i.e. Pantone colors) If the design department decides to match the Pantone color with the closest CMYK equivalent but the customer has specified a certain PANTONE color, this could be a recipe for disaster. Always make sure that there is clear communication not only at the beginning of the job, but that the information on the work order is verified all the way through the production stage.
Inventory Mismanagement
Sales people need to ensure that when they take an order that production can actually get the supplies needed to complete the order on time. There’s nothing worse than getting a job to do 100 posters but after you start the project you find that you only have enough paper to do 80 posters. You call the supplier to order more paper but you are told it will take 3 weeks to get the order. With not enough time to meet the customer’s deadline, you have to now substitute another paper for the balance of the job that looks pretty close. The only problem here is that if you have a customer with particular needs and you miss matched the color by even 1%, it will cause you the re-run 20% of the job again later on. Always have 2 sources for all the supplies you will need to purchase, just in case.
So the real lesson here is that the key to success is communication – both with clients and with your staff.
