The label printer you choose is a customer service decision

A consumer with a serious allergy picks up a jar in the grocery aisle, turns it over, finds a QR code and scans it because that is what the package said to do. Nothing happens. The code is a hair out of spec – printed a shade too light, or crowded too close to the edge of the die – and the phone cannot read it. The prospective buyer puts the jar back and buys the competitor.

That customer just had a bad experience with your company. The actual failure happened three months earlier, in a conversation between your operations manager and an account rep at a label shop – a conversation that got rushed, or never happened at all.

This is the part of customer service that nobody puts on the org chart. Your customers experience your suppliers, whether they know it or not. And right now, the relationship between product manufacturers and the companies printing their labels is potentially getting more fragile in three directions at once. 

Here are scenarios that are becoming more relevant with each passing day:

Your printer is being acquired

Consolidation is rampant in the printing world, the same way it is running through most industries. The pattern after a deal closes is familiar to anybody who has lived through one: your account rep changes, then changes again. 

The person who knew that your amber bottle needs a slightly warmer red, or that your ingredient panel gets revised every spring, is gone. Nobody wrote it down, because it lived in a relationship rather than a file.

What reaches your customer is a run that does not match last quarter’s run. Shoppers notice this more than manufacturers expect. A bottle that looks a little off, sitting next to the one they remember, does not read as a printing variance. It reads as counterfeit, or as a
cheapened product.

Your printer is automating

Some of this is genuinely good for you. Quotes that used to take five business days now come back in hours. Automated file checking catches problems in minutes that used to take a technician the better part of an hour, which means fewer rounds of email and a faster path to a first proof. 

The catch is the sorting. Shops are increasingly splitting work into a fast automated lane for standard jobs and a slower human lane for anything unusual – odd die shapes, uncommon substrates, specialty finishes. That is a sensible division. But the fast lane is cheaper to operate, so it is always under quiet pressure to widen. If your job has a wrinkle in it and gets sorted as standard anyway, nobody is being dishonest. You simply find out at press check, at the worst possible moment in your launch calendar.

Your customer experiences that as an empty shelf facing, or a seasonal item that shows up three weeks into the season.

Your printer is losing its veterans

The press operator shortage is real and it is demographic – experienced people are retiring faster than they are being replaced. Judgment is the thing that leaves with them (e.g., knowing that a particular substrate behaves differently in August humidity). Another example: noticing that the regulatory copy on a proof looks wrong even though it matched the file you sent.

That last one should get your attention. The catch that does not happen is the one your customer holds in their hand.

What to do about it

None of this argues for treating your label printer as a commodity and shopping purely on price, which is the reflex when supplier relationships get complicated. It argues for the opposite.

Ask who your person is, and how long they have been in that seat. Ask what happens to your account if and when the shop is acquired. Ask, before every non-routine job, whether a human being is looking at the quote or whether it went through automated. 

Ask where in their operation automation is not allowed to go; a shop that has actually thought about it will answer in a few seconds. Then take the additional step almost nobody does, telling them what the label is for – who buys it, what the consumer is looking for, what happens if it is wrong.

You are somebody’s customer before you are somebody’s supplier. The care you receive upstream has a way of arriving downstream, in the hands of the person you are actually trying to serve.

Mark Lusky (www.markluskycommunications.com/mark-lusky-bio) is the president of Lusky Enterprises, Inc. (www.markluskycommunications.com), a 41-year-established marketing communications company dedicated to clients that live and breathe trust, likeability, and respect (thereby eschewing the “lie, cheat, steal” culture so prevalent today). Contact him at: 303-621-6136; [email protected].