Category: Editorial

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moo.com: a tale of excellent customer service

Post author By myglasseye
Post date January 8, 2013
No Comments on moo.com: a tale of excellent customer service

When was the last time you were blown away by amazing customer service, and who was it? For me it was yesterday, and Moo.com.

It’s the start of the year and I’m planning to take my event and fine art photography business up a notch, so my website is down for a redesign and I’m in the market for new business cards.

I only trust Moo with my business cards these days. I discovered them a few years ago when the only other well-known option for small order business cards was Vistaprint (yuck) and Moo’s cheerful website, design flexibility and all-round friendliness won me over. But the real draw is their business cards (and stickers, labels, postcards and minicards!), which are beautiful quality and very affordable.

This really sounds like a sales pitch but honestly, they’re great. I always get a compliment when I hand one of my cards out, which each carry a different photo full-bleed on the reverse. Given that most business cards end up in a bin eventually, that “Oooh!” moment when I produce them from my pocket really matters.

Well this weekend my mum, who has been on their mailing list since she discovered their sticky labels and minicards, sent me a 30% discount code she’d just received in one such newsletter. I’ve been unsubscribing myself from anything that isn’t important in an effort to de-clutter my inbox so I didn’t get that newsletter but I could certainly use the code. Over the next couple of days I settled on 30 new reverse photos, uploaded them and went to order 100 as well as a couple of holders that display the cards in a fan arrangement – very useful for embellishing that “Oooh!” moment.

Plans: foiled

Except – tragedy! The code didn’t work; it turns out everyone had received their own code, locked to their own account. And I didn’t have one. That’ll teach me for hitting Unsubscribe.

The offer was due to end in a few hours – what to do? Try and send the designs to my mum via Dropbox and have her upload them and order? (That was bound to end in strained family relations) Sign up to the newsletter and leave my order until the next discount code? (Maybe, but there’s no time like the present, seize the day, etc) Chalk it up to experience and order anyway? (And miss out on a potential £15 saving?!)

Or email Moo Support, explain the situation and cheekily ask if I could have my own discount code to replace the one my mum was never going to use, pretty please?

I’m becoming a believer in at least giving the milk of human kindness a chance, so I went for the last option, then closed the browser window and forgot about it.

Just a few hours later (the same day!) Moo support got back to me:

Dear Owen,

Thank you for getting in touch with the MOO Team.

Yes that’s fine! Please use the following code for 30% off your order:

(my secret code was here and it’s all gone now :D)

This one-time use code expires one year from today. Enter this code when you reach the payment screen during checkout. Be sure to enter the code before you input your payment information.

Please feel free to contact us again if you have any further questions.

Best regards,

Ron C
MOO

Now that’s customer service. They didn’t need to do that – they could have apologised and suggested I sign up for the newsletter (which I have done anyway). Instead they guaranteed a sale, saved me some money and increased my loyalty to the point where I’m now writing this blog to share the love, like the corporate shill I most definitely am not.

When was the last time a company’s customer support blew you away like that?

10% off your first Moo order

Full disclosure – the links to Moo.com on this page use my referral link – you can get 10% off your first order and I’ll get a credit towards a new pack of cards in return – thank you! Alternatively if you prefer to pay full price, you can use this plain link.

They don’t just do business cards – there’s minicards, stickers, labels and postcards, all customised with your own designs or some of their free templates. Use them to seal your customer packages, or put your website address on and hand them out in the street – there’s plenty more suggestions on their site.

Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

Photographic

Instagram up to their tricks again

Post author By myglasseye
Post date September 26, 2012
No Comments on Instagram up to their tricks again

When Instagram 2.0 came out I was pretty pissed off with it. There's a lot of retro Photo filter apps out there but Instagram 1.x had a good range of looks, a lovely atmosphere to many of the filters, and a great sharing mechanism that really kept the number of taps required to a minimum.

2.0 made a number of significant and subtle changes to the filters. They added Live Previews before you take a shot, but they removed much of the character of the filters including all the textures that gave the a filmic feel. They removed some filters altogether, notably a particularly lovely black and white called Gotham leaving just a watery contrast-free effort that rarely has much to offer, especially compared to the b&w options in something like Hipstamatic. And they added a few new filters, which all looked kind of similar to me.

I ranted about it, to no avail obviously. In time I was back using the app daily and grew to like some of the new filters (I find myself using Amaro almost exclusively) but I almost never posted another B&W with it again. I concluded that the muting of most of the filters had to do with the tech they put in place to do live previews.

Whatever the reason was, it seems that with the latest update, iPhone 5 users can't do Live Previews any more. I'm happily sticking with my 4S and I have the feature still available, but I never use it so I don't really care; I take the photo first and pick the filter later or I'd miss the moment.

Some believe the live previews being on their way out could be a symptom of Instagram dragging the iOS app down to the same capability of the Android version, so there is 'parity'. That is, giving iOS users the same experience Android users get because that's easier for Instagram to maintain, and/or presents a more unified experience (which to me, if they actually used that latter claim, would reek of a bullshit excuse).

On the other hand, it occurs to me that maybe they figured that live previews are kind of pointless because you can pick any filter you like after shooting your snap and not save it until you're happy. To me it seems plausible that they could just be streamlining out a feature that doesn't offer all that much; keeping it simple Jobs-style, knowing when to say no?

This change certainly won't make any difference to the way I use Instagram when it drips down to us 4S users, but nonetheless I would love to know the real reason why they're doing it. Objectively, I can't decide. Cynically, I know exactly which one I'd bet on.

Posted with Blogsy

Tags Android

Apple

An Insp-Apple-Executive-Assistant-ector Calls

Post author By myglasseye
Post date August 10, 2012

On Tuesday this week I emailed Tim Cook after I read about Mat Honan’s Mac being wiped via iCloud’s Remote Wipe feature. I pointed out that Apple has tremendous control over my data now, partly via iCloud but especially Remote Wipe. What happened to Mat is an example of why people warn about over-reliance on the cloud.

A member of the executive assistant team, Philippe, called me back today and we spoke about my concerns in light of Apple’s response later in the week. He was a nice guy, friendly and open to constructive criticism from a customer’s point of view and promised my comments would be read.

My concerns when I wrote were that no amount of technical safeguarding on the customer’s part would have prevented this particular trick from working. Having a backup would have made it a mere inconvenience, but it would still have happened. Even Apple were caught by surprise, claiming their protocols should not have allowed it. But it did happen, because of human error at customer support in the face of an ingenious manipulation.

Apple said they were taking that facility offline for 24 hours to examine what went wrong and fix it. iCloud is Apple’s future so I have to trust that this is pretty serious shit for them and it’s Going To Get Fixed; Philippe didn’t explicitly disagree with that observation.

Of course, somehow eliminating human error for password reset won’t make iCloud impenetrable; I expect individual accounts get hacked via other techniques as often as any other world class online service, so back your stuff up. But if Apple starts to allow password reset over the phone again, whatever they’ve done we just have to trust them if we want to keep using the service.

I told him I understood why Apple don’t make many statements about stuff like this until they know what they’re dealing with but that when they do know I’m going to want to be reassured that it’s fixed.

I’m still using iCloud but this week I turned off Remote Wipe for my Mac. If something this avoidable and out of my control happens again, I’ll have to review how I use it again and it’ll start to feel like when I had a Facebook account and I had to keep checking my Privacy settings every time they tweaked something. Using an Apple service shouldn’t feel like managing Facebook.

Philippe didn’t give anything juicy away, obviously, as he was calling to listen and reassure. I cheekily asked how the Executive team found out about the hack and what the feeling at Apple was about something this serious; but, you know…

Finally we talked about the security of Find My Phone and how a savvy thief knows now that if you can turn the phone off you’ll disable the signal. If the option were available to disable shutdown or maybe even Airplane mode without a PIN, I’d use that if it bought me a couple more hours tracking time.

So if you see that turn up in iOS 6, that was my idea.

Tags Apple

Editorial Photographic Pictorial

Cockneys Versus Zombies is coming!

Post author By myglasseye
Post date August 1, 2012

Alan Ford and Honor Blackman make a stand against the zombie invasion.

Last summer I did stills on Cockneys Versus Zombies (IMDb page), a comedy horror written by James Moran and Lukas Roche, directed by Matthias Hoene and starring Michelle Ryan, Harry Treadaway, Honor Blackman, Alan Ford, Rasmus Hardiker and plenty more equally great actors. It’s been a long time coming, but there’s finally a release date (August 31st) and a poster (over there on the left).

There’s also a load of new stills out there which is pleasing for me as there’s always such a long wait between taking the shots and then being able to share them; over a year in this case. Looking through Google Images it seems there’s around a dozen of mine out there now so I figure I can post them here too. There’s a handful of my favourites below and the rest are on my unit stills photography site.

I know I could be biased, but I reckon it’s going to be great; hordes of flesh-rotting zombies, buckets of gore, good laughs and lots of guns – well worth a trip to the flicks!

Cockneys Versus Zombies (2012) — One of the undead gnaws on some poor unfortunate soul’s leg. Well, he wasn’t needing it anyway.

Tags Movies

Photographic Pictorial

YoLandi Visser (two of them!) in the house

Post author By myglasseye
Post date July 3, 2012
1 Comment on YoLandi Visser (two of them!) in the house

A couple of days ago I posted a gallery of my wife dressed up as YoLandi Visser from South African rap outfit Die Antwoord. If you don’t know them check out their videos on YouTube, starting with I Fink U Freeky, then go and buy their albums on iTunes. Heads up if you’re at work or near kids right now – they’re pretty direct. And kind of sweary.

(that’s a lot of links to swallow in the first paragraph so I’ll give you a second to check them out…

… before we continue)

Well that first shoot was a practice run for this Thursday, 5th of July, when she’s off to see them in London with her best friend, Carike, who is from South Africa herself and has been translating the lyrics when they lurch violently into Afrikaans. They’re both going to be dressing up as YoLandi and have been putting their costumes together for weeks, culminating last week with a delivery of brightly coloured plastic watches just like the ones YoLandi has on in the new video, so we got together at the garages behind our flat and had a joint photoshoot.

I really like some of the shots Hollie and I got first time but we both agreed that given who she’s playing the light was a bit too soft and warm in general; one of her favourites is harshly and simply lit.

This time I ran the flashes bare, no umbrella or softbox or even a gel, and we used more daylight. The location helped a lot too, and the YoLandis sparked off each other pretty good for the camera. I still feel like I ended up making the photos inside the garage look a bit too ‘lit’; overall I prefer the ones towards the end of the shoot when we were completely outside, but have a look and decide for yourself.

By the way, if you still haven’t checked out Die Antwoord, fair warning that pretending to be YoLandi Visser means makin’ out like a bad ass mofo, yo, just so long as you know it’s all fo’ show… 😉

This silhouette shot was initially a total fluke as the flash lighting the foreground didn’t fire. Loved the effect and got a couple more. The flash was at the bottom of frame so I Photoshopped it out quickly. Obviously that’s purest South African moonshine in the bottle and not water.

Gold shoes, gold rings, gold medallions, gold leggings, blonde wigs, custom t-shirts, slap-strap watches… they look totally ZEF.

I love all these ones at the garage doors. Just one flash here, high camera left, behind and above me, filling in a slightly underexposed ambient, on a Daylight white balance. I really love the mood of these shots.

This is one of my favourites of the whole shoot.

We took a break to have biscuits and coffee sat on the floor of the garage, and go through some pictures. I had Die Antwoord playing on my iPad while we were shooting so the YoLandis got some more practice in.

After elevenses we moved to the end of the garages. I had the lights set up roughly where I wanted them and ran back to our garage to grab my bag. Grabbed this one quickly, on the move, to see if the triggers were up and running; it gives you an idea of how the next bunch were done.

Hollie used to be a cheerleader; still got the moves!

This last one wasn’t planned, but a neighbour pulled up on his bike as we were finishing so we grabbed one posing with it – it’s extra cool because we noticed that it says NINJA on the bike – perfect!

Hope you enjoyed the photos as much as we enjoyed making them. Thanks for reading!

Tags Portraits, Strobist