In-bound Enquiry Handling

I’ve needed to get some repro work for a couple of weeks now.  I’ve put off sorting it out, as it’s not the most glamourous of things on my todo list let’s face it. I fired off a couple of emails to the leading guys my googling threw up; Hobs Reprographics and Servicepoint.  Both have several stores near where I am at the moment, so I emailed each firm’s nearest London outlet.

Now, according to my basic web search, my job could come to anywhere between £500-1,000.  Given the average cost of a job must surely be lower than that, a sizeable order is clearly in the offing.  So what happened to my two enquiries?

Hobs Repro didn’t even reply to my mail.  Unbelievable.

Servicepoint did reply.  But before you think they’re a shoo-in for the business, their reply was the rather succinct “please call”.  That was it.  No further explanation.  Not even a phone number.  Nor a name, as the mail came from one of those ‘info’ type addies.  With a disappointed sigh, I went back on their site and called them up.

The lady answering the phone thought that either ‘Colin or Sandra’ would have replied to my enquiry.  4 minutes of holding later, it transpired Colin did, yet he was unavailable.  So a second woman tried to ‘help’ me.  Extraordinarily perfunctionary, I had to ask all the questions, before being given a randomly generated price.

Neither will be winning my business today, nor the future goodies that will follow it.  I just hope the rest of the bureaux/outsourcing industry for this kind of gear are not this useless.  And I must do some mystery shopping to ensure my guys handle in-bound better!