Note: I certainly can’t say this to people on the phone when they call the lab, and I question the wisdom in posting it here but that is what a blog is for. Speaking your mind and expressing an opinion. This is my opinion and not that of the ownership group of BB Color, Inc. As I am the actual process of BB Color, well, you get my drift.
Nowhere. Well, for certain people free support is still available. That group of people would be our own lab customers.
I don’t like having to tell people that they need to call the lab that they are using for support, but with the current state of affairs I simply have no choice. Many, many moons ago when I was first starting with this software I got a tremendous amount of help learning to use it from the photographer that I bought a dongle from. He let me come and observe his process for doing events, how they put together T&I jobs with it and how to get around things when issues arose. All in all, I bet I spent over 100 hours following him around before and after I bought his extra dongle. I offered to pay. He said no. He got the same kind of free help when he was starting and asked that I repay him by helping others with it where and when I could. I have done that. Many times over I have repaid that debt. I have driven to Tennessee. I have gone to far away Indiana. I have been to West Virgina to help people out. I did accept expense money for these trips, but the day rate was on the house. I owed someone that changed my business as well as life for my family and I wanted to repay that debt.
The straw that broke the camel’s back for me came a few weeks ago when a lady from the east coast called me 4 times in one afternoon, once on my cell phone after hours, because she couldn’t get an order to send to her lab. She had been on the phone with them for a day and a half and needed to get the order printed. I tried and tried to tell her in the most polite fashion possible that it was the lab’s responsibility to help her and that I couldn’t spend our time and money to the benefit of another lab. She told me that she knew that I could help her and that I wouldn’t because she wasn’t my customer (duh). I offered to help her for $50, which is the same that ExpressDigital would have charged her, or I told her that I would help her point her order to my lab for free. Either would have fixed the issue, as the problem wasn’t actually on her end. (Yes, I did tell her this in our first phone call when I suggested that if she redirected the order to me she still had time to get it shipped that day.) Neither of these options appealed to her. She preferred to use a lab that couldn’t fix their own problems let alone hers.
At the end of our 4th conversation she called me an asshole and a thief. I ended the call with some other filth coming from her mouth.
We aren’t interested in grabbing market share among Labtricity labs with low prices on certain items or by only providing direct output. We have no interest in having two labs where we print work for one group of customers for one price and a second group that gets their work for half the price as group A from the same machine on the same paper. We are interested in long term, mutually beneficial relationships that go far beyond what you pay for an 8×10. Any lab in the country can buy the Labtricity software and suddenly they are a “professional” lab. We live it and breath it every day. This software isn’t what makes us a professional lab. The level of service and support that we provide to our customers does. Yes, we as a lab shoot sports T&I and action for local schools and organizations. We share the knowledge that we gain from these ventures with any customer that needs and asks for help with growing their business. We provide support for the software, but we also provide support to help you fill the software with images that will put food on your table and a roof over your head. $1.50 for an 8×10 is too high? OK. That’s fine. You can certainly find it cheaper.
If your interest is strictly price, you will find it cheaper than what I offer. If you have an interest that goes beyond price, you just might want to pick up the phone and call me. We support our customers in their business needs as well as their software needs from 7 AM to 11 PM 7 days a week. After hours support is done via email to support@bbcolorlabs.com and is answered by whomever has the support department Treo that day.
We provide professional support based on years of extensive hands on experience with both the software and the business of shooting youth sports and sporting events. Further, we provide this support free of charge. To our customers. Everyone else, we are open from 9 to 5 Monday thru Friday. Have your credit card ready because each call costs $50. We do issue full lab credit to all paying support customers that become lab print customers. Drop $50 on a support call and end up a customer, we will credit that $50 to your Private Network account to use for prints and shipping. Not even ExpressDigital offers you that.
Powered by Zoundry
Filed under: ExpressDigital, Photoreflect.com
