When You Make a Promise, Keep It
Have you ever made a purchase online and been unhappy with the results? Maybe the product that showed up wasn’t exactly what you expected, or the size was off, or perhaps something went wrong in transit and the object was mishandled and broken. Whatever the case may be, how a company responds to your poor experience says a lot about them. We’ve all been in the position to need to return something without a brick and mortar location to return it to.The fact of the matter is that accidents happen. Whether in transit or even before the product is shipped and delivered, it’s always a possibility that a mistake will rear its head and have to be dealt with. It’s in planning for those eventualities that we came up with our 100% quality guarantee.
The Signature Coins quality guarantee states that if you receive your order of challenge coins and notice any production mistake or defect at all, we’ll replace those coins free of charge. It’s one thing to see that written out, but what does it look like in action? Here are a few stories of customer complaints and details about how we went about rectifying our mistakes.
Shipping Problems
The difficult truth about the shipping process is that so much of it is ultimately out of the company’s hands. You spend precious time designing and perfecting your coin with the help of our art team, our production team spends time on getting the creation of your challenge coins just right and packaged for you, and then they hand those coins off to a shipping company and the rest of the process is left to fate.It’s this uncertainty that’s led to our current APO/FPO shipping practices. In order to ensure that your package arrives undamaged, we first ship them to our Orlando offices, and then repackage them for delivery through the military mail. That allows us a level of control for military orders, but what about customers who have their packages shipped to their homes or offices? In those moments, we put our faith in the shipping company and remain prepared to rectify any mistakes which may arrive.
Sometimes, the problem with shipping can be as simple as the coin order needing to be divided between different packages and one package not arriving in a timely fashion, or the wrong quantity of coins being packaged and delivered.
One customer experienced this exact problem on an order delivered on November 11, 2018. After taking part in our Veterans Day promotion of getting an extra 10 coins per every 100 coins ordered, the customer’s order arrived without the bonus coins.
He sent us an email immediately saying, “I am guessing there is another shipment coming? As noted below – there was to be a total of 80 of the Texas coins. This shipment only has 70 coins. Do you know when I can expect the additional coins?”
As a result, we were able to contact the production team and have them quickly remake the missing coins and overnight ship them to him. All of this was done free of charge, of course.
Our quick attention and ability to rectify the error even led to him leaving us a positive review.
Design and Production Errors
Shipping problems are bad enough, but production errors are the kind of thing we work hard to avoid at all cost. We pride ourselves on creating a superior product in industry-leading turnaround times. But when mistakes happen, as they inevitably will, that reputation is threatened.Recently, a customer emailed us after receipt of her coin order with a few direct, and perfectly reasonable, complaints about her challenge coins. “I received our coins today. Please take a look. I have no idea how someone allowed them out of the factory. The front of the coin is beautiful. The back of the coin is garbage and looks nothing like the proof. The blue is not the same color, and it is spilled all over lady justice. Please tell me how you are going to make this right for us, and what you want me to do with this batch.”
She included an image with her email, and the mistakes made in production were obvious. We sent her concerns to our production team and had them remake a couple samples of the coins immediately and send us images back of the new coins.
When we forwarded those images to the customer, we saw that a part of the problem was with the translucent colorfill on the back. Translucent colorfill is an option we often suggest to customers looking to create coins with shinier, or more metallic looking colors. In this instance, however, because the customer’s complaints situated around that aspect of the design, we decided to create another sample coin using regular enamel.
It was this last change that impressed the customer the most. She approved the new design of the coins and we were able to produce them and ship them out to her. The response was nothing short of glowing. “They came in today and they are lovely. I cannot tell you what a difference in craftsmanship there is. Aside from the translucent color being a much better choice, the actual application is infinitely better. The first production had errors on the front side of the coin as well. This batch is markedly better. Thank you for being committed to making a quality coin.”
When Expectations Don’t Match Reality
One of the things we work hard on is ensuring our customers know exactly what to expect from their coin order by making sure that their proof matches what the final coin will look like as closely as possible. But sometimes, there can be a slight miscommunication leading to different expectations.
The coin above was ordered by a customer to be distributed among a group of coworkers. When their order arrived, the coworkers weren’t happy with the final product because they expected the coins to have a particular kind of antiqued/weathered look. Their expectation was that the antiquing would add a level of contrast between the raised and recessed red areas of the coin.
Our production team attempted a few techniques that add an antique look to our precious metal coins, but the powder coating process used to make the red metal of these coins was too resistant to those techniques.
Our initial solution to the problem was to send the customer shipping labels, have them ship the coins back to us, and then, here in our office, our sales team sanded and added a new kind of coating to a few of the coins. We sent the customer images back to see how they felt about this new direction.
The images we sent featured coins our staff had sanded down, by hand, with a fine sandpaper, and coated in dirt and other materials to give them that old, weathered look. While the customer acknowledged that this was closer to what they were expecting, we didn’t feel comfortable sending them coins we’d created in such a way.
In the end, we agreed to make the coins again using an antique copper plating instead of the red. That outcome was agreeable and created a product we could stand behind and that accomplished the customer’s goals.
Promising Quality Means Delivering Quality No Matter What
It’s never a great feeling when you have to recreate a customer order for free. Every company operates with an eye on the bottom line, and giving away product for free never looks good on the books. However, standing behind your product and making your customers happy in the long run is exactly the type of thing that will be good for business down the road. And those considerations are always more important than any hurt feelings or minor annoyance when your mistakes are pointed out to you.Our dedication to quality means that we strive to get our customers’ orders and designs right every time. When we fall short of that mark, we work just as hard to rectify that mistake and find a solution that will make the customer happy. Investing in our customers’ satisfaction is one of the elements that has allowed us to rise to the top of the custom coin industry.
