The Power of Customer Service.

Hive! How I have missed you! I am very excited to start my re-caps, but before I do, I wanted to share a little story with you. A story about (as the title suggests) the power of customer service.

As I was organizing my wedding photos for recaps, I figured, "Hey, now would be a great time to put together our wedding album." I had already filtered out the best group shots, and my very most favorite of the 435,233,425,823,542,752 other shots taken by our photographers and guests. I had everything in neat folders on our computer, and I knew which service I wanted to use for our DIY wedding album. I used Picaboo to make our guest book of engagement pictures and was very happy with the results. The program was easy to use, and the finished product was nice without costing an arm and a leg. Putting together an album should be EASY AS PIE!

Wrong. I knew I shouldn't have been so smug, I knew things often do not go as planned, but I was young and foolish! This was weeks ago! I have learned so much since then.

I set out one Saturday to hammer out the album. I spent about seven hours glued to the computer screen arranging little photo boxes and picking just the right images to tell our story. I was almost done. Everything was in place and I was SO happy with how it looked. I went to the print preview, one final step before completion, and that is where things started to go wrong. Two of the photos were missing. I went back to the "edit" page and there they were. Back to print preview, gone. Edit, there. Print preview, gone. (I am a little slow so I did this a few times just to make sure I wasn't seeing things.) If it hadn't been incredibly late at night, I would have used the "Live Chat" Picaboo offers for struggling customers, however it was after hours so I sent an e-mail and decided to worry about it in the morning.

When clicked save the screen went blank. No error message, no please hang up and try again, just a white screen with a "!" in the center. My mouth went dry. I shakily got up and went to the kitchen hoping I would come back to find my photo album. Instead I found "!". Panic began to spread through my body as I realized it might all be gone. I began frantically clicking and opening windows in hopes that I would be able to find the album. The more I clicked the more hopeless it became. I could not navigate off the "!" pages without "losing your changes" and if I opened I new window it would not let me log into my account. I was trying to keep it together and think through what was happening, but my bedtime had long since passed and logic was slipping away with it.  Mr. Aardvark came in to check on my progress and that is when I lost it it.

Hive, I sobbed. I cried harder than I have since Mr. A moved here, big ugly tears. Not just for the lost work, but for the beautiful day I had spent indoors, ignoring my husband. There were also angry tears too. Why was it just a white screen with an exclamation point?? How could it all just vanish?? Instead of looking at me like a total nut job, Mr. Aardvark gave me a big hug and told me it was time for bed. We could both worry about it more in the morning. (I love this man.)

The next day, with the friendly help of someone on the "Live Chat" I had part of my album back. By part, I mean I had the format I had arranged and seven (out of 46) pages of photos. I had also loaded the desktop version of the program because I thought it would be better about protecting my work. Then I stepped away from the project to cool off a bit.

The following weekend I set to work replacing the photos. It did not take ALL DAY this time but a good four hours. I had save compulsively throughout the process so I figured I would be ok. One final save! But then when I tried to navigate away from the main page it told me it was not done uploading. It was at this point I noticed the upload tracker. It.was.crawling. So I left it alone. Every half hour or so I would check in and see it was inching slowly across the screen. After THREE HOURS (disclaimer, we have cheapo internet with crappy upload speeds so this was bad, but not unexpected)  it was this close to being done. I was about to relax and enjoy my victory over technology,  when for a  second time disaster struck.

This time there was an error message. There had been an issue with the upload. When I re-opened the program all of my work from the second time around was gone. At this point I was not sad at all. Only angry. Really, rage-fully angry. I felt like I had been duped into wasting more time on this and vowed to find a different vendor. I sent customer service and e-mail detailing my disappointment and frustration (by some act of God I refrained from filling it with curse words) and I walked away from the project entirely.

Over the last week I corresponded (via e-mail) with one, very helpful customer service rep. The fact that I was not bounced around between anonymous "service technicians meant a lot to me. She explained that the crashes were due to the fact that some of the images I was using were over 10MB. She was also able to recover all but a few pages of my second book and showed me how to save them on my actual desktop (not the same thing as uploading). She was friendly and apologetic. These things went a long way to ease my mind. She managed to restore my faith in the company and offered me a great deal to make up for my frustration. Her assistance and Mr. Aardvark's support are the only two things that kept me from plunging headlong into insanity.

The moral of the story is, service is everything. The whole ship was turned around and the problem was not only solved, it was explained. Knowing how to avoid these troubles in the future proves they value not only their own time, but mine as well. I felt confident placing my order last night and I cannot wait to see the final product.

Have you ever had an experience saved by great service? Did you hit any speed bumps with technology during your planning (or post wedding) process?