Hello, My Name is Kevin Schwarm
A free spirit's take on work, life, travel, & consumerism

Last year, my wife, who’s in the financial services industry, ordered 150 calendars from the Calendar Coop Center in Sleepy Eye, MN. According to this company, as clients, we were going to follow a certain process to get these calendars created and published. This company would email our office a pre-printed copy of the calendar credentials before publication.

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We never received this email to review the draft. When I inquired about the status of the review email, the 150 calendars arrived at our office. Fortunately, they were ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, part of her credentials was missing from each calendar. Perhaps someone had a sleepy eye? Therefore, according to the guidelines of my wife’s company, these calendars were not compliant.

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We contacted the Calendar Coop Center regarding the typo, and they apologized for the error. They asked whether we OKed the email, and we explained that we had never received the email draft review. I emphasized that we needed her exact credentials on the calendar due to compliance regulations. They were cooperative and insisted they’d print the new calendars and ship them out within 2 days. We offered to ship back the calendars, but they insisted we could keep them. Within four business days, our corrected calendars did arrive.

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I appreciated their customer service focus last year. Even though the error was insignificant, we had to correct it. After apologizing, they accepted responsibility and did the necessary work to create and ship the correct information.

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This year, we did not hesitate to order from them, and thankfully, the calendars arrived corrected. One true test of a company is not if it makes mistakes but how it handles situations when mistakes are made. This is a fine example of a company being customer-centric and making the best of a business interaction that initially didn’t start well.

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Do you have an example of a company making an error but then being responsible and correcting the situation?