Working with customers – the way it should be

At MitzvahArt we recently got a request on our toll free number, (877) 9-MITZVA, or (877) 964-8982, about whether we offer a “Sign-in” board version of our product. Unfortunately, as is often the case in business, we do not. So we called them back and talked about what they were looking for, with low expectations of course.  But a remarkable thing happened.  We talked about what this customer’s vision was (I’ll call her Stephanie).  She was looking for a larger piece that had plenty of space on the matting for guests to leave a personal note to the Bar Mitzvah.  The issues with our piece were three:

• First, the mat area was too small for the number of guests they were expecting,
• Second, with the size of the art itself the enlarged mat would be huge and frankly too big, and
• Third, she was afraid that someone might write on the art itself and ruin it.

The temptation was to say, ok well sorry… but we continued to talk and Stephanie proceeded to tell me about a Sign in board product she saw on another site that was designed to slip an 8×10 picture in to personalize it. Well we could certainly make the MitzvahArt 8×10… problems 1&2 all of a sudden seemed solvable.  Would she consider buying two products and putting them together herself?

Well the nature of a sign in board is that you have to take it apart to get the matting signed and put it back together after the event anyway so…. Yes Stephanie would do that.  Things are looking up.  She suggested that she could use a picture of her son during the reception and swap in the MitzvahArt afterwords.  Hmm… not ideal but ok.  Then I suggested that we could send her two copies of the MitzvahArt, one as usual on high quality paper for the final product and another on regular printer paper that she could use during the reception in case of a particularly sweeping signature ends on the art… Success! We had a deal.

A few weeks later we got a great email from Stephanie and this very cool picture of the final product!

Needless to say, we are both very happy we could work together on this.