Good Customer Service and the Perils of Being a Wedding Videographer
Sometimes providing good customer service is a hard road to walk and you have to stop and ask yourself the question, “When is enough, enough?” You want to please. You try hard to please, but what do you do when that’s just not in the cards? You’ve got clients that can’t be pleased. Finding a good solution that makes everyone happy can be an arduous, challenging problem.
This all began shortly after completing a very successful wedding video for a couple in my area with venues at Wayfarers Chapel and Trump Golf Club. I sensed from our initial pre-wedding conversations that this couple was very detail-minded so I set up a courtesy visit in the studio to go over the edited video on the computer with them just in case they had any changes they wanted to make before burning their Blu-Ray Disc. After about five hours of working together and thoroughly enjoying their non-stop stream of laughter and commentary as we watched their video for the first time, I said to myself, “This is good! They’re amazed!” My joy turned out to be short-lived, however.
I came to learn after they had their video for a couple of days that they felt there wasn’t enough footage of the bride’s mother in the final edit, so I searched the raw footage for any clips I might have bypassed and agreed to include them. There were a few scenes that were excluded because the mom wasn’t presenting well on camera for one reason or another, and I wanted to include only the clips of her looking her best.
Because the bride was particularly close to her mother she wanted all the clips of her included, regardless, and I was happy to accommodate her request, so a new edit was created, and a new Blu-Ray Disc burned. No charge. Done? Happy clients? Not yet.
To my surprise, a short while later another request came from the couple to eliminate parts of the best man’s toast. Why hadn’t this come up in the initial review of the video? Because someone at the bride’s place of work made it an issue. I sat with the couple for another couple of hours creating an edit that they liked and encoded and burned another blue ray disc for them, not charging them for any additional time or materials. I had hoped that the video was done at this point, but no such luck.
Another request came in a little while later to revise some of the previous revisions (yes, you read that correctly) at which point I expressed to the couple, not with any displeasure, mind you, my disappointment at not being able to find a way to please them, explaining that every time I made an adjustment something else seemed to come up. Well, I worked with the groom on yet a forth round of revisions to try to put a happy ending on this story, all the while feeling discouraged that my previous efforts didn’t meet with greater success, and through it all I was still bound and determined to make this work and turn my couple into happy customers. It had now become something of an obsession to please them.
Some considerable time passed and I wasn’t expecting to hear from the couple ever again when I was surprised by an email from them indicating that the review they had originally promised me was sent to http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=24kt+sound+%26+video&find_loc=Inglewood%2C+CA&ns=1 and a couple of other review sites. Oh boy! Now I was really in trouble! This sounded like it was going to be a very bad day. I knew that it would take about ten good reviews to undo the damage caused by just one bad one. It wasn’t fair.
Well, the review is on yelp, one of the longest reviews I’ve seen and all very positive. It took a lot of time and effort to get to that point, but all’s well that ends well. Just another day in the life of a wedding videographer.
Please comment and share similar stories of your own. Do you ever write a client off and when do you decide enough is enough, if ever?