A little over two years ago I had the great pleasure of meeting a family that has become one of my very favorite families. Mom is such a sweet outgoing person and one of the strongest people I have met and I have to admit that I loved them even more when her and her son Charlie told me earlier this year that one of their favorite TV shows is Supergirl! (For those of you who don’t know I’m a huge superhero fan!!!) But this post is not really about that family or how much I love them, even though I do, it’s about how they changed the way I look at customer service.
For years I didn’t offer photo prints, I didn’t want to bother with it and I was convinced that no one really wanted or needed that service. What I found is as moms it’s something that we don’t even know that we need, but we do! I really discovered how much I was failing my client and not really serving them about a couple of month after this families first session with me.
A little back story, the reason they decided to hire a photographer for family portraits was not a happy one. This family with two beautiful sons was about to loose one of their boys to a brain tumor. Knowing they didn’t have much time left they wanted to get professional family portraits of all of them together.
We had a beautiful family session with their family of four and grandma out in Boulder. A few months after the session I heard from mom, she even though she had received digital files of her portraits a few weeks after the session she had not printed any of them yet. Her son has since passed and she was preparing for the funeral including trying to print an image of him to display at the funeral. That hit me hard, this grieving mom was rushing around trying to get her pictures printed, instead of spending time with her family at this hard time. Not only was she spending her time doing this but she ordered the images online, accidentally drove to the wrong store and then when she finally got to the right store she realized that she forgot to bring the print release and the lab would not release the photo to her.
Thank God not every mom has to go through this situation. But that doesn’t mean that we have time in our busy lives to go get our images printed, framed and hung. I can’t tell you how many times clients told me more than a year after their session that they still haven’t printed their images, I can’t tell you how many times I photographed my own kids and got too busy to print and hang the portraits.
I don’t want my clients to waste their money on images they are not enjoying in their home. I don’t want anyone to have to search through a dropbox, computer or stack of old CD’s to get images printed if a family member passes away. My clients enjoy their images on their walls each and every day, and I never want to give another client less service than that!
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