At Maple Ridge Farms (asi/68680), nearly every workday starts with one question: “Are we having fun yet?” It’s a good daily reminder that work doesn’t have to be a stressor, and even though it can be exhausting at times, the atmosphere can stay fun. Still, though, no matter how happy every employee is, sometimes orders can go wrong. And that’s when the true test happens.

Here, winners of the 2018 Distributor Choice Awards share five problematic situations and the customer service tactics they used to turn a would-be disaster into an on-time deliverable.

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PROBLEM 1: The Last-Minute Customer

We’ve all had them, the scourge (and increasingly the norm) of the promotional products industry: rush orders. You get a call that morning for an order needed that night. A bit of a short timeframe, right? Well, that’s what Rich Carollo, the VP of marketing at Lion Circle (asi/67620), recently had to deal with.

Lion Circle, based in the Chicago area, received a call at 8 a.m. from a customer who needed 20,000 fans for a concert at 7 p.m. that night – in California. By 10 a.m., everyone at Lion Circle was working on the order. The fans were finished and on a plane by 4 p.m. central time to reach that client in time for the show.

“It’s one thing when everybody talks about the idea, but it’s the customer that can come though and actually give you the artwork and the PO and all that good stuff. That’s when you can turn something like that,” Carollo says. “Obviously it’s something I don’t always say we should be doing, but we do try to make things happen. You have to make sure you’re doing your job and you have to hope whoever is shipping is doing their job.”

Urgent in-hands dates are running rampant in the industry. Bag Makers (asi/37940) has hand-delivered orders multiple times to make sure product gets to a distributor on time. So has BIC Graphic (asi/40480), when a customer care associate drove more than 50 miles to deliver an order personally. At SnugZ USA (asi/88060), the company has even gone so far as to book flights for employees who then carry orders with them to deliver on time. Quick turnaround times can also mean someone is going to work through the weekend.

“We’ve come in on a Saturday and produced the entire request to make the order happen,” says Christin Ford, customer service manager at Hub Pen (asi/61966). “What we thought we were going to lose we ended up gaining by making a business decision to come in on a Saturday and complete the job.”

PROBLEM 2: The Missing Box

Towel Specialties (asi/91605) recently hit a big snag in one of its orders: a box wasn’t going to arrive, ever.

“We recently shipped an order for 36 blankets, which had two shipping boxes,” says Robert Marshall, Towel Specialties’ customer service manager. “Two days after it shipped, we received an email from the customer letting us know that one of the tracking numbers indicated that UPS damaged the box and threw away its contents and would notify the shipper. We researched it on our end, and sure enough, this box of 18 blankets would not be arriving to the end-user.”

Of course, the distributor was frantic – not least because it was her biggest customer. The event these blankets were slated for started in less than 48 hours. So Towel Specialties kicked into gear, embroidering the remaining blankets that same day and dropping the box off at the nearest large UPS hub since the company’s UPS driver had already come and left the building. Thankfully, the package was sorted and loaded on a plane to arrive the next morning.

Paul Lage, president and CEO at Gill Studios (asi/56950), shared a similar story. UPS lost an entire order of stickers a customer needed for an event. It happened on a Friday afternoon, of course, and the event was the following day. So to get the product out the door and in the customer’s hands on time, several employees volunteered to work overtime, redoing the order, making sure it shipped, and interfacing with the client to both keep them informed of the situation and provide tracking numbers. One employee even took time on a Saturday morning to call and make sure the order arrived.

PROBLEM 3: The Unexpected Circumstance

Sometimes, even the best-laid plans go awry. A recent order for iClick (asi/62124) ran into exactly that problem.

“A client called in to check and see if he placed an order in the next day (instead of the day he called), if we could still meet his in-hands date,” says Sarah Parsons, iClick’s VP of systems and customer experience. “He had been planning to get it in that day, but ended up having to leave work early to take his mom to the hospital because she had fallen.”

It was an unfortunate circumstance that required immediate intervention, both on the health and the business side. The production team at iClick gave the go-ahead for the order – which arrived on time despite the unexpected late start – and to really make it a winning customer service experience, the company sent flowers and a get-well card to the client’s mother.

“Taking the time to really listen to a customer and make a personal connection puts a more intimate touch on things,” Parsons says. “It was really nice to be able to allow a client to take a business stress off their plate when they had more important things to deal with.”

Terry Brizz, president at Galaxy Balloons (asi/55675), has unfortunately seen his fair share of health-related order rushes, as well.

“Galaxy has had requests for super-quick production for funerals and memorial services,” he says. “We understand that unplanned needs arise. A young child died in a car accident; he was a huge baseball fan. The family wanted to have baseballs printed to hand out at the funeral service. Galaxy was contacted by a distributor to see if we could get these printed and delivered in just one day. Everyone at Galaxy stepped up. Graphics created a beautiful design, printers stayed a little late to get them done, shipping drove them to the UPS hub. It meant a lot to the little boy’s family and friends, and we were glad that we could be a part of that healing for them.”

PROBLEM 4: The Delayed Deliverables

Sometimes it’s out of your control. Something has been delayed, and there’s nothing anyone did to cause it. Denver Norris, sales representative at Logo Mats (asi/67849), once had a customer switch to his company after a previous supplier messed up an order. It resulted in a high-volume order with very little lead time. But the customer service team knocked it out of the park, Norris says, working as quickly as possible to complete every step of the order process.

Dan Edge, national sales manager at Peerless Umbrella (asi/76730), has encountered a different kind of delay. “We had a job that was a direct import and it was stuck in a customs exam for over a week,” he says. “There was nothing we could do to speed up this process. They were for a breakfast scheduled the morning after we finally received the umbrellas. Even if we shipped overnight, there was no guarantee they would deliver on time, so our rep volunteered to drive the umbrellas about 10 hours through the night to get them delivered in time for their 7 a.m. start.”

PROBLEM 5: The Complicated Project

Some distributors just have incredibly complicated projects. Joelle Stahlecker, a marketing coordinator at Maple Ridge Farms (asi/68680), shared a time that stood out to her and the team.

“We were working on a very large order for a distributor with a lot of special requests and a tight timeframe,” she says. “Every department worked together from preliminary quote to shipment to ensure the order went out exactly as the client wanted it.”

Little did they know at the time, the order was a life-changing one for the distributor. Not only did they improve their relationship with their client, but because it was such a large order, it allowed them to take a trans-Atlantic flight for a family visit they never thought would happen.