I had a really interesting experience ordering last minute new business cards this week that taught me a big business lesson. I’m heading to a conference in a few days and just wrapped up the new branding for Automation Heroes, but in the process of getting all the new web stuff online I totally forgot to design and print new business cards to advertise the new site – crap! Luckily I’m pretty handy with Photoshop and was able to whip up a new design quickly.

I went to my “go-to” solution for printing cards Moo.com – I love them and order everything print-able from them whenever possible. However, since I was creating these cards at the very last-minute, I had to take their upsell for both express printing and delivery to get them delivered in time for my trip.

Normally I’m okay with spending a little extra for brands that I love, but I was going to be paying more for express services than the small number of cards I was ordering! This seemed a bit ridiculous so I did a bit of research and found that I could get 2 to 3 times more cards from Fedex office for less than half of the price. Awesome!

Unfortunately, Fedex’s online project tool wasn’t so “Awesome”. I spent the next few minutes re-designing my cards to fit their pixel recommendations, then attempted to upload my project. The front side went up very smoothly. Then I had to get the back sides of the cards uploaded… which is apparently quite an ordeal.

Perhaps it was my brain misfiring from working way too many hours that day already, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure out how to get the image for the back of my cards uploaded after ~30 minutes of tweaking, starting the project over, and experimenting with basically every method I could imagine.

I build computers from scratch and have an engineering degree… surely this software couldn’t outsmart me, right? Apparently not in this case. I returned to Moo.com with my tail between my legs and paid the extra money to submit my project and be done with it. Albeit a frustrating experience, it also made me realize how incredibly important an awesome user experience is for your business.

It’s something that you don’t really think about until you have a poor experience. Moo.com’s project editor is amazing – it’s attractive, logical, fast, easy to use, and essentially perfect for quickly uploading and tweaking printing projects. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same about Fedex. (On a side note, how are business cards not on the list of things that “Small Business” would want to print??).

Delivering Customer Happiness

This is the core reason that companies like Zappos.com have been able to flip entire industries upside down. Making your customer’s life easier (and thus more awesome) is the best way to build a super loyal fanbase. The world is changing so quickly with the power of the internet – is your business providing exceptional value to your customers (making their life noticeably better in some way)? If not, how can you do this better?

Kathy Sierra had an incredible speech at Business of Software 2012 on Creating the minimum badass user – I highly recommend giving it a watch!

Source: KATHY SIERRA: BUILDING THE MINIMUM BADASS USER, BUSINESS OF SOFTWARE. A MASTERCLASS IN THINKING ABOUT SOFTWARE PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT.

P.S. I got the new cards delivered WAY faster than I expected – Moo rocks!!