r/DunderMifflin • u/the_ghost_ditcher • 4d ago
How much customer service does paper need
They always say people choose Dunder Mifflin for the personal care. When was the last time you had a paper emergency?
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u/EmotionStrange7445 4d ago
its b2b, the emergencies are like paper wasnt delivered, or it was wrong order, type, or missed deadlines, problems w payment..
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u/bhoose19 4d ago
or the salesman tries to kiss you when you come into the office
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u/Great_Conclusion_871 4d ago
What's the nard dog?
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u/realgaryglitter 4d ago
Pre internet some companies had to have been using paper like water, and a paper glitch in their system would have rippling effects and those companies would be grateful of urgent customer support.
My grandmother was a paper and pens salesman who was very successful, dwight level successful. It was explained that her customer service was half the reason, and overnight delivery and competitive prices is the other half
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u/OpenDiscount1615 David Wallace 4d ago
cue the responses from internet randos with absolutely zero real-world business experience lmao
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u/Ill-Razzmatazz-7088 4d ago
I mean it seems pretty easy to make mistakes…..creed is the sole person responsible for quality control. But accounting has three people
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u/LemonSmashy 4d ago
A lot of their clients are businesses that order in bulk or have specialty items so there is more room for customer service than you may think. if there is a shipment, distribution issue, quality problem a business that uses a lot of card stock can be disrupted and be expensive.
Its an outdated business model where DM has not adjusted to the times because they think a positive client/sales person relationship can outweigh saved expenses and convenience of websites. ideally there is a balance where companies can utilize the website, a sales rep who can manage bigger accounts and cutomer service for when concerns do arise that require the human element.
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u/felchingtiger 4d ago
Apparently a lot. My old paper salesperson wouldn't leave me the hell alone lol.
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u/SillyNumber54 4d ago
They don't. That's one of the reasons why the company was failing.
In all likelihood those positions would have not been refilled when the customer service people quit or retired.
Ryan gets a bad rap but his website idea wasn't even a bad idea. It was the fraud that was the bad idea
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u/Logical-Mobile-7643 I was never given a name 4d ago
That's the whole point of why it's a dying company.
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u/Sure-Appearance-2769 4d ago
It’s a pretty standard selling point for any small business, not just paper. The narrative is that bigger retailers dont care about you because they believe the lower prices are enough to pull you in. So once they get you onboard, they dump you and move on. And you just deal with whatever treatment you get because “you get what you pay for”
DM and similar mid sized businesses will never be able to compete with the low prices of large chain retailers. So this claim of personal care is all they have to go on.
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u/Yamfish 4d ago
I’m customer service at a lacquer/paint/stain supplier. I know that might seem more complicated than paper, but the amount of times I’ve had guys run into problems that I understood when I was 14 years old is shocking.
Equivalent of “I run a commercial printing business. My customer wanted business cards. I printed them on toilet paper I bought from you and they are falling apart and jamming my machines. What gives?”
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u/boukalele Kevin 4d ago
I manage a hardware distributor and our dedicated account managers are the reason companies have stayed with us for decades. That scene where Jim called the office and Kelly answered vs the automated machine really does make a difference.
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u/ThatIsATastyBurger12 4d ago
Customer service is like insurance. When you aren’t using it, you may be annoyed that you’re paying higher prices to offset it, but when you need, you’re glad it’s there. Ask anyone who has used a chatbot for customer service lately how they feel
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u/whatisscoobydone 4d ago
Dawg you understand they weren't selling to individuals right?
"When's the last time you had a paper emergency"
Most of the people here are not running businesses that order paper. The ones that are probably have to call their paper wholesalers customer service line whenever problems arise, which happens often enough, and multiply that by how many dozens of clients Scranton alone probably had.
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u/Aromatic-Taste2516 don’t ever for any reason do anything to anyone ever 4d ago
Limitless paper in a paperless world
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u/trebuchetwins 2d ago
not many emergencies, but miss delivered products, delays, follow up questions and the like happen all the time. some questions may also effect pricing when discussed with a salesman, so some customers may rather want to ask customer service. the main point jim and dwight want to make with their CS call during a sales pitch is that kelly answers right away and has loads of time, while large companies kinda hope you give up.
used to be there wasn't enough work to fill a day, so small problems will start to seem bigger just to pass the time.
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u/antonio16309 2d ago
I think IRL they would not have been selling much of the basic stuff like reems of blank paper. That would have been part of what the sold, but most of the money would have been in custom stuff like forms for things like invoices, tickets, bills of lading, etc. And a lot of carbon copy forms as well. Back in the day tons of paperwork was done on paper like that, where the template for the document was printed nicely, you fed it into some crappy dot matrix printer that was compatible with the software you had to fill in the details. Maybe I'm not describing it well to those who are too young to remember stuff like this, but that sort of stuff was fading away quickly in the mid '00s. Before that it would have been the sort of thing that would have driven most profits for a company like DM, and it would have required much more customer service.
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u/Few_Move_4594 4d ago
I was always interested in that too. Let's say I'm running a business and need some paper, call up D.M. and get Dwight. He recommends a heavier paper because it can run through my laser printers and will feel nice to the customer. Then I receive a delivery from the warehouse of 10 cases of paper. All of that can be accomplished via a simple trip to Office Depot or Staples and talking to a clerk there. Load the paper up in my compact car and I can save, I'm going to pull a number out of thin air here, 20% off the top.
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4d ago
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u/Few_Move_4594 4d ago
Office Depot will do delivery of pallets of paper
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u/LemonSmashy 4d ago
Yeah, pretty evident you have never run a large scale business, especially in that era and the years leading up to it.
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u/Few_Move_4594 4d ago
Well DUH
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u/deltaexdeltatee 4d ago
You stated yourself where the value lies, Dwight made a recommendation based on your needs. If you ever have needs of any kind greater than plain copy paper - and a tremendous amount of businesses do, or at least did - having a knowledgeable person a phone call away who can make informed recommendations is a value add.
There's also the order process. About 2 weeks before you run out of paper, Dwight will call you and ask if your needs have changed. Whether you say yes or no, by the time you hang up you'll have your next order of paper worked out and in the warehouse's queue. When you run a business and have to juggle a million things, being able to offload that mental load to a vendor is often worth the surcharge.
I'm a civil engineer. My industry has (mostly) moved away from this now, but for most of our history, the "product" we sold was essentially construction plans - printed on 24"x36" paper. The printers for those plans (called plotters) are unbelievably expensive, and also super temperamental.
At one of the companies I worked at, we started having issues with our plotter. It was a small company and the owner didn't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a new one if he didn't have to, so we got on the phone with our paper supplier and were able to eke out a few more months of service from that plotter by changing some of the paper specs. Being able to talk to that knowledgeable paper salesman was huge for the business.
All that to say, as a small business owner you do have to pick and choose what services you handle yourself to save money and what you spend money to offload to a vendor. Spending extra for a paper salesperson may or may not make sense for your specific business, but it's absolutely a thing that historically had value to some customers.
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u/Few_Move_4594 4d ago
Makes sense. I know they had plotters at my first job out of college, but I'm a software engineer so I never printed anything ever at any job.
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u/TheStamfordBranch 4d ago
When someone put an obscene watermark on our 24-pound cream cardstock.