I speak to my teams in the
Dunwoody - Sandy Springs and
Tri-Cities - Atlanta Airport Centers with some frequency about what we will do when we make a mistake in fulfilling a Client’s order. I would like to think we would be perfect every time, but we are human beings. Perfection
will elude us. As I see it, it’s not the mistake itself that will define us in the eyes of our Clients and Prospects, it’s what we do to make it right. The corollary to this perspective is that we need to learn from such mistakes tpoavoid them in the future.
We recently had a fairly simple order for four training manuals. There were several modules and different numbers of copies and binding choices for each manual. Overall, however, this level of complexity should not have tested our systems, but it did. Our production team printed too many of one production manual, and none of another. Our Quality Control process should have caught this error, but we miss it there, too.
The Client picked up the Order the afternoon before the training sessions for which the materials were intended. He immediately raised the alarm after reviewing the printed items. He added that his sessions would start the following morning at 8 AM. I understood the challenge we faced, and we had to make it right.
Ella, our Production Coordinator in Sandy Springs stayed past the end of her day to print the missing item, which was the biggest one (90 pages) with the most copies (25). I picked up the finished product after dinner that evening around 8:30 PM. My husband agreed to deliver the materials to our Client’s training location the next morning, then drove and met the Client at 7 AM. We made it right for the Client.