Listen to your customers

So, as you know, one of our services is eFinalDate.com. This is one of those crazy little ideas that just seems to make sense, because it takes an old manual way of doing things, and puts it into a mobile phone. And all those ideas make sense right? 

Well, we interviewed one of our clients a few days ago, and learned a lot about the benefits she sees. Some of the things I didn't even know they used in their process and somethings I never would have thought of as a possibility for having value, or at least, why would anyone care or notice that.

Here are some of the benefits of eFinalDate.com 

Benefits of using eFinalDate

For the person who used to do rubbings

• Faster to take measurements of monument with the camera
• No messy carbon paper and rubbing material
• Immediate and traceable delivery of monument measurements to the monument maker

For the designer

• More joy doing final date orders.
• Faster to import measurements into design software
• Faster to match fonts with high confidence
• Faster to match line spacing between rows of text
• Faster to match spacing between characters in a row of text
• Confidence that stencil will not overlap unseen figures on monument

For the company

• Faster for designers to finish final date and other design orders
• Faster to know the status of the order
• Faster to receive orders and measurements from customers
• Designers enjoy final date orders more
• Better customer experience and safety net by providing the customer with an approval picture showing what the results will look like on the actual monument prior to performing the work.
• Less printing paper and toner
• Clear communication between designer and setter about where the stencil should be positioned on the monument.

Lesson: Talk to the customers

Prior to this experience, I thought it was all about the taking of the picture, and a little benefit from the designer's perspective. I never knew how much paper and toner they used to prove out the new design from a rubbing. Or how many times a designer might have to get up and walk to the printer, then back to the seat, sit down, and try again.

See, the old way of copying information is to have someone go to a cemetery and create a rubbing of the data on the tombstone. That rubbing becomes the measurements and is shipped back to the shop for the designer to work on. But they have to wait for it.

Once it arrives, and they are ready, they grab a ruler and measure the rubbing. And create text in their design software that matches the text on the rubbing with the suspected size. Then they print the text (careful to keep it small enough so the printing doesn't auto-scale to something inaccurate). Then the fold the paper so a crease is right through the letter they want to measure. It might be off by 1/8" so, the designer makes an adjustment in the design software, hits print, hits okay, walks to the printer (waits for it to print), comes back, sits down, measures again. If it looks good, she tries a few other letters until she is satisfied. If it doesn't look good, then keep printing and trying again.

Now this is all for one line of text. But a monument usually has 3 or 4: lines of text Title, name, birth date, death date. *Sigh* 😩

So the same process must be done for each line of text. Now we are at about 6 printed pages per line * 4 lines = 24 pages.

But now we have to handle the spacing of the lines. Half a dozen more pages, and one stencil. It only cost us 0.288% trees for the paper and maybe $0.06 * 30 = $1.80 of toner, and 10 health motivating steps * 30 pages = 300 steps. But hey at least the fit bit is happy!

Learning the benefits from the customers perspective. Helped us see better ways to describe the benefits to prospective customers.