Locating Hard-To-Find Envelopes

Janice One of LCI Paper’s newest customers is Janice in Pittsburgh. She found us while searching for a hard-to-find envelope size in a particular color. I had the pleasure of assisting Janice on the phone. We found the perfect envelope to match the custom-designed invitation for her son’s Bar Mitzvah. Janice was nice enough to participate in LCI’s 17th podcast episode and convey her thoughts about LCI Paper’s products and customer service to all of you.

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Here is a transcript of the interview:

The project that I’ve been working on is my son Jonathan’s Bar Mitzvah. And, you know, I decided to design the invitation instead of just buying an invitation from a book. Because I actually wrote a cookbook and so I’m using the graphic designer that did the cookbook for me to do the invitation. We did this great invitation but we designed it in a unique way so it’s not standard.

So what happened was I needed a 7 1/2 inch square brown envelope with a square flap in the back. And my printer went to her regular sources and she couldn’t find it and she said, “Well, it just isn’t available.”

And I decided, “Well, let me kind of search around for it.” Because it would ruin our whole concept if I couldn’t find this 7 1/2 inch square because all that was available was 6 1/2 inch square and 8 1/2 in square.

So I’d searched around, and sure enough, your company had this great 7 1/2 inch square envelope and that’s how I came to find you.

I have to congratulate you guys for an incredible customer service experience that I had with you. I had a difficult request to find. First of all, as I said, the 7 1/2 square envelope, which you were seemingly the only people on the web that had these difficult to find items; but then on top of it, when I dealt with you in particular Josh, you were so accommodating. You immediately were willing to send me samples at no charge. You knew all of your stock down pat, no problem. You did tremendous followup. I immediately had followup e-mails, not just one, but multiple followup e-mails tracking the progress of my package that my order had been filled, that it was in the mail, what my confirmation number was, that UPS had sent it. And you basically couldn’t have been more accommodating, couldn’t have been more knowledgeable, and truly served your customer marvelously. And I was very happy with both the underlying product and with the service experience I had from you and was more than happy to come back and buy the product from you.

And in fact, I have to say when I got the envelope in the mail, I hadn’t had time to open it before I got to the meeting with my designer. So I walked into the meeting and I ripped open the outer UPS envelope and we pulled out the brown envelope and we were both so happy with the product that the designer stood up and threw his arms around me…

[laughter]

…because we were so genuinely happy that after this whole search, we’d finally found the product. So it was great. You really made this invitation work. And everything from that grew from there. So it was a great success story and I was happy to call you up today and reorder the stuff. And again, I was asking you for another sample because now I’m going to do a thank you card. You were more than accommodating with all of these different colors of beige, and I’m happy to buy from you a second time.

I read your blog after I talked to you and I mean, I can see that your company is really well-run and I saw those pictures of your boss that you put in there. And I mean, it must be a very sharp company because everyone seems to be very committed to customer service.

Yup, that definitely is a central focus.

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I appreciate Janice’s willingness to talk about her positive experience with LCI Paper. Of course, I appreciate her compliments. It’s always rewarding to be recognized for one’s work. And I always like to try to inspire others by asking customers to talk about their own unique projects. I think when you hear from people that are being creative, it inspires you to be creative.

After our telephone interview, I asked Janice more about the cookbook she mentioned. She writes, “Hi Josh. Here is the photo of my cookbook, An Acquired Taste. It can be purchased for $19.95 from my son’s school in Pittsburgh, Winchester Thurston School.”

cookbook