How to Deal With Challenging Vendors

If you’ve ever struggled with how to effectively manage relationships with your vendors, following are some tips learned from the trenches of cataloging.

Complaints About the Call Center

The second hand on my watch swept past 12 ... again. I’d been on hold for 10 long minutes. Another music-on-hold tune began, and I realized I’d heard it already. I’d been on hold so long, the tape loop was repeating!

As I listened, I imagined all the customers who had viewed my beautiful catalog, read my great copy, found a product they really loved, called—and now were hanging up in disgust at the endless wait.

The second hand on my watch was approaching 12 again—11 minutes on hold, and still counting!

At some point in their careers, most catalogers find themselves struggling with a call center that won’t answer the phones quickly enough. Causes for these delays include: phone-line problems that block calls before they reach the call center; phone center software that can’t route calls to operators; call-center managers who can’t match operators with peak load times; and operators who are overwhelmed because the call center has taken on more business than it can handle.

Unfortunately, once these problems begin, they tend to become worse. Long hold times for inbound callers lead to increased call-abandonment rates, repeat calls and irate customer service calls—all of which further burden the call-center operation.

How can you cope? Following are some tips:

Detect the problem early. Place routine test calls to your catalog’s 800 number. Don’t rely on vendor-generated reports of abandon percentages and average times on hold. Many problems won’t show up in those reports.

For example, one cataloger’s phone company scrambled the lines so that about 20 percent of inbound callers got a phone company-generated message that the 800 number had been disconnected. These calls never showed up in phone center reports since they never reached the phone center.

Print a simple report showing the on-hold times that you measure on your test calls, and send the report to your call-center manager. Even incompetent call-center reps tend to grease the squeaky wheels first. And if your call-center staffers truly are incompetent, they may not know they have a problem—until you tell them.

Consider hiring a roll-over service that can pick up calls when your primary call center can’t. Yes, there will be headaches from having two different centers entering orders, but it’s better than losing overflow orders altogether.

Drop your mail in a way that minimizes call-center glut. There are several ways to do this. For national bulk mail center (BMC) drops, your catalog printer/mailer probably is timing them to arrive in-home within a three- or four-day window nationally.

If your call center can’t answer the number of calls you expect to get after a national drop, ask your printer/mailer to spread out the drops, consistent with your overall circulation plan. One way your printer can do this is by rescheduling when each truckload is dispatched to the various BMCs.

To achieve an even wider spread of in-homes, divide your mailing into BMC groups, and mail each group separately. If your mailing is reasonably large, this can be done economically. You won’t lose your sortation discount, because each drop will go to a single BMC. And the glut at your call center will drop.

For an even wider in-home spread, drop all your mail locally; that will give you a one- to four-week spread on national arrivals, depending on how heavy national mail volume is when you drop.

Design(er) Issues

The freelance designer had a fine portfolio and good references and seemed to clearly understand every detail during our hand-off meeting. But a week passed, then 10 days, and when the cataloger finally received the first proofs—just four pages out of a 32-page book—the results looked amateurish. And so much time had been lost that the cataloger couldn’t switch designers and still get to the color house in time to meet the print date.

After many years of hiring designers of all kinds, one truth I’ve learned is that designers’ portfolios seldom match the work they’ll do for you. It’s not due to deception, but merely because designers’ portfolios are comprised of their very best work, and nobody can do his or her best work all of the time. What you’ll generally get from designers is their average work, not their best. Be sure you start out with reasonable expectations.

But even after you’ve adjusted your expectations, it’s still easy to get into trouble with a designer. Why? Catalog work is different from the other type of work designers do. A designer who hasn’t done much catalog work almost inevitably will experience at least one of the following:

• Scheduling crises. Catalog work is way more time-consuming than non-catalog designers can imagine. The sheer number of images, pages and copy blocks quickly will overwhelm whatever workflow systems the designer has developed for simpler work. The designer ends up spending hours, even days groping desperately through oceans of computer files, trying to find correct elements as deadlines loom.

• Budget crises. Underestimating the time a job will require leads directly to underestimating how much it will cost.

• Organizational crises. Design work and organizational work tend to use opposite sides of the brain. The better a designer is as a creative, the worse that designer may be as an organizer. Generality: If your designer is a good organizer, you’ll dislike the design. And if your designer is a good designer, he/she will be floundering in a sea of confusion much of the time.

• Design crises. A non-catalog designer’s first catalog work generally will have the following characteristics: too much white space, tiny hard-to-read copy, a very blocky or boxy look, small headlines and total confusion about what copy goes with which photo.

How to cope?

Don’t gamble a whole catalog on a designer you’ve never used for catalog work. The probability of disaster is just too high. Instead, try them out on just a spread or two to see how they do. If you absolutely must use a non-catalog designer for some reason, start the production process extremely early.

Insist on seeing results early. Don’t let weeks pass with nothing coming back from your new designer. If you do, you’ll probably be disappointed with the results, and the passage of time will have backed you into a corner on scheduling.

Assume your designer will be disorganized, and handle most of the organizational details yourself. Don’t hand the designer a pile of random CDs and floppies and expect the designer to sort out where the copy and images are. Figure out for yourself the correct image names, which pages they go on, and the file names for the matching copy blocks, and then tell the designer.

Create intermediate scheduling milestones for your designer. Be specific, such as: “We have four weeks for design, so by the end of week one, you’ll have sent me proofs on the first eight pages.” And help your designer meet the goals.

Develop a backup plan. Enough said.

The Mad Mailer

It was mailing time, so the printer’s mailing crew headed to the storage area where all the bound and ink-jetted catalogs were stored. The crew hauled out several pallets filled with presorted catalogs, rolled them to the in-house post office and entered them into the mailstream. Everything went smoothly, except for one small detail—they pulled and mailed the wrong pallets.

It always surprises me that catalogers will spend months agonizing about every detail of their designs and copy, and weeks examining every nuance of color at the color house—but won’t spend five minutes overseeing the ink-jetting and mailing of their catalogs.

In fact, the events that occur between the end of the press run and when catalogs begin arriving in-home are complex and filled with possibilities for error. And errors at this stage can be very dangerous to a cataloger’s bottom line.

For example, last year a small but well-known cataloger’s Christmas mailing was overlooked at the printer and never dropped. The cataloger was nearly bankrupted. The year before, a different national catalog printer mailed the wrong version of a cataloger’s book, one in which the offer had already expired.

How to cope?

Ask your printer to fax you live catalog samples when they’re being ink-jetted. Ask to see a cover, a back cover and—if you’re ink-jetting an order form—the order form. When you get this fax, confirm the following:

• it’s the proper catalog version;

• all the components of the ink-jetting are present (for example, I once got such a proof with no bar code); and

• the sample’s name and address actually are in your database. Be sure that name and mailing code are supposed to be on this mailing.

When a mailing occurs, insist the printer send to you the round-stamped Postal 3602 form, or whatever equivalent your printer/mailer uses. This is your only proof of what actually entered the mailstream. When you get it, compare the count on this form with the count you got from your data-processing house. If they don’t match, something went wrong.

Add seed names to all your mailings and use them to confirm that your catalogs are indeed arriving in-home nationwide and that the proper version was mailed. A system of seed names needn’t be complicated; it can be a list of your family and friends nationwide.

If you find an error, call your printer/mailer immediately and negotiate a solution. In the example I gave at the head of this section, seed reports tipped the cataloger that an error occurred, and the cataloger called the printer/mailer immediately. Since the cataloger had iron-clad proof of the error, the printer/mailer reprinted and remailed at no cost to the cataloger.

Susan McIntyre is president of McIntyre Direct, a catalog consulting company based in Portland, OR. She can be reached at (503) 735-9515.