(jetalone)
Maybe photo-printing service Snapfish wasn’t purchased by HP. No, the company just might have been acquired by Santa Claus. This holiday season, they just couldn’t stop giving things away. When Paige’s mother was missing half of the envelopes for her order of 40 holiday cards, Snapfish was quick to send new ones. Three times over.
I have always had a really good experience ordering prints of digital photos for reasonable prices using Snapfish. For the past couple years, my mother has created and ordered the family’s holiday cards from Snapfish instead of making us sit through the painful process of taking a portrait with her traditional still camera. This year, my mother placed an order for 40 copies of the holiday cards that she created, complete with envelopes, from Snapfish.com on Dec. 10th. When she received the cards a few days later,e discovered that Snapfish only included 20 envelopes with the 40 holiday cards–a slight problem when it comes to mailing out holiday greetings.
After making this discovery, my mother e-mailed Snapfish’s customer service to report the error and request an additional 20 envelopes to use with the remaining holiday cards. The customer service e-mail account at Snapfish must be monitored by several different employees (which makes sense given the size of the company and the volume of e-mails that account could receive), because my mother received three different e-mails in response to her request, each of which confirmed that envelopes would be sent to our home address via overnight mail. Although my mother thought it was unusual to receive three separate e-mails, she didn’t pay much attention to it.
Four days later, the 20 additional envelopes that were “overnighted” to our house still hadn’t arrived. My mother sent another e-mail to Snapfish customer service and was assured that the envelopes were on their way to us. Two days later, a package finally arrived from Snapfish. Of course, when we opened the package, we found not 20, but 40 additional envelopes. Annoying because of the waste involved, but it would’ve been worse to receive less than the expected 20, right?
The next day, another package arrived from Snapfish.com containing–you guessed it–another 40 envelopes. Given that my mother received three confirmation e-mails from customer service, we’re expecting another 40 envelopes to be delivered to us any day now.
Too few, too many… Snapfish needs to get its act together when it comes to its envelopes! While I applaud their customer service for a timely and (generally) satisfactory response to my mother’s problem, it appears that they need a better customer service problem resolution tracking system!
PREVIOUSLY:
Snapfish Sends Another Copy Of Photo Book, No One Knows Why
I like Snapfish, but seen several instances where their customer service FAILs. They are currently Flickr’s printing partner and have a forum there. They often let things go for months without response and then ‘promise’ repeatedly to fix things. Their customer service is run from India, poorly.
Citation on the India customer service? I want to hark on moving jobs overseas as much as the next guy, but American customer service agents are just as capable as Indian agents at being terrible at customer service. It really comes down to the company’s training and how much leeway they gives their agents to solve problems.
The latest:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/snapfish/discuss/72157625686624484/
Slow responses:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/snapfish/discuss/72157622670147241/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/snapfish/discuss/72157623123743572/
(this last one was my issue, it’s been a year so far.)
Some are kinda funny:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/snapfish/discuss/72157625415253576/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/snapfish/discuss/72157622814335222/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/snapfish/discuss/72157622667532319/
Rather than me just posting the entire forum I’d suggest you take a look. I don’t know if the forum is available to the general public. You may have to join Flickr (free) and maybe even join the Snapfish ‘group’. It all depends how they set the group up in the beginning.
I get my cards done at Staples. $25 for 72 cards isn’t that bad of a deal, and if there is a problem, like there was for me this year, they can correct it for you on the spot.
Hey! What did you do on your cards, BTW?
I know you were asking for suggestions.
Just like that old story about the motel and the bath soap business. You tell them you have enough soap thank you, and they dump some more off at your doorstep.
No matter how many people are monitoring an inbox, an e-mail should be marked as read once it is clicked. That to me should trigger an indication that the problem is being or has been addressed. Then you move it to a resolved folder once you’re done, and make a note of what has been done. This is about as complicated as they really need and should not be overly difficult to implement.
What a strange thing to complain about, is this what 2011 is going to be like?
I have a secret ..ok it isn’t a secret. I hate SnapFish. From 2000-2005 I used Snapfish as my online resource to order prints and save photos. In 2005 they decided that I wasn’t purchasing enough prints and took it upon themselves to delete all of my photos for the simple fact that I didn’t order prints.
We do not forget.