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One of those days, one of those customers.
Had a customer ring me a few weeks back wanting his new van signwritten. He was fed up of his bland £100 jobs that he gets the local cowboy to do, so asks for something really loud & bright, using only red & blue colours.
I send him off a design on the 15th, which he loves. Make a few tweaks & I send it back on the 18th. He rings me the same day clutching his willy saying how much he loves it & wants it done, but it has to be after the 21st as he’s getting a new office number put in & won’t know it until then.
I hear nothing, so give him a ring today & was stunned by his response.
"Ah, sorry mate. My wife didn’t like it, thought it was a bit tacky, so we’ve gone to XX signs & they’ve given us a more subtle design, & it’s £20 cheaper"
I explained that he wanted loud & bright & if he wanted it toned down he should’ve asked. I also discovered that the other company’s design is all within the one panel & blue & grey, whereas mine was at an angle right through the side of the van using much more vinyl & time.
"yeah, well, sorry mate, you win some, you lose some & the wife prefers their design"
Well, thank you very much for giving me one criteria to work with, & giving someone else another. It’s a good job I hadn’t cut the job out minus the new office number. I’ve a good mind to charge him a design fee (:)
Gwaredd.
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6 Replies
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Gwaredd, welcome to the world of signmaking :lol1:
It’s a real pain when someone does that to you but believe me if you stay in the industry it will happen more than once again.
I don’t send out artwork anymore or let customers take it away with them unless they pay an artwork fee which is deducted from the final price of the job if they go ahead. If you had done something like that then his wife would never have seen it or at least you would have got something for your time. -
Gwaredd,
That really hacks me off mate. But as Martin said get the design fee up front or 50% of the job. Some people think it costs nothing for a design and don’t take into consideration your time. Send him a bill.
(:) (chat.) (chat.) -
Annoying as that is – it could have been worse. XX Sign Company could have copied your design for £20 less.
As Martin says, welcome to our world. 🙁
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We do what Martin says for clients that aren’t referred to us by other clients or they are cold callers. We don’t let them keep the designs. They can see the quality of the work we design and decide. They then can approve the job and they’ll get the designs then.
When we first started out we dealt with these "bottom feeders" on a regular basis. Now our cliental has stepped up a notch and we don’t get this anymore. Our quote approval rate at the moment is at like 95% but most of our work is by referral or by new clients seeing existing jobs we’ve done.
So stick it out taking it as a learning experience and don’t take it to personally.
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Cheers lads. We do usually put the design fee charge in the first bit of the correspondence, saying it will be included in the final price if the job goes ahead, but as this was a customer with whom we’ve dealt with before (albeit 10 years ago), I didn’t bother. 😕
The customer who recommended him to me is fuming though, & says the other design looks boring & plain compared to the first draft I did. Oh well.
As a reference, what sort of money do you guys charge for a design fee? I was thinking of around £50.00.
Cheers,
Gwaredd.
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chances are you wont get any joy from these tossers so just take it as a lesson in life…
you could try my approach in customer service…
we had a customer here lately who wanted a 3 year old sign corrected..
apparently a name was spelled wrong and even though it was okay for the last 3 years he wanted it corrected now….and that he also wanted a couple of phone numbers added in..
i said no hassle with the spelling error, i’d correct that free of charge but the new numbers would cost 20 euros..which he agreed to..
when he came back… he tried to make out i’d said it was all free, that i was ripping him off and he’d sue me….all over 20 flipping quid..
my first thought was deck him 👿
my second thought was just give him the sign and suffer the loss 😕
my third thought, which i went with ,
was to strip the phone numbers off the sign,
and then i gave him the sign and shook his hand,congratulating him on being the first real b*ll*cks i’d ever had in the shop
:lol1: and then i escorted him to the gate and told him never to come back…..best day i had in ages :lol1: :lol1:
sometimes the customer is not always right
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