Prateek Dayal

Printo is a Seedfund and Sequoia funded company and according to their website they are

Printo provides businesses with world-class printing solutions. We are:

• India’s first and fastest growing network of print and document shops.
• India’s first branded retail chain that provides services of international standard.
• A professional, board-managed company co-founded by experts from the document printing and the IT services industries.

I had used their service in Feb 2008 when they had just opened up a center near Jayadeva Hospital in Bangalore. We went to their store and got a card designed. Since customization costs about Rs 50 per half an hour of designer time, we picked one from the template, supplied our logo and got the card ready. We printed about 200 of these and paid Rs 300 (Rs 150 per 100 cards). We were told that soon they would be introducing the facility to reorder the same job by phone or website and a couple of months later we got a call telling us that they have introduced the facility.

Before leaving for proto.in, we wanted to get a lot of cards printed and we called up printo. The lady who picked up the call had no clue and told us that she would call us back and never called back (ofcourse). We called them again the next day and told them that we wanted to reorder our old card and they told us that the system automatically deletes files older than 3 months! Now no one ever told this to use before and I don’t even see why with the storage costs falling by the hour, a system should delete a file to free up a few MB. Remember this is not a picture of my cat uploaded to some free file sharing site. This is a file on which printo has already made money and have a good chance of making money again. Considering the storage costs on S3 are about 15 cents per GB, this file would cost printo a couple of paise a month to store. Atleast before deleting, their system can check and send an email asking the customer if they would like to replace the order.

That would be fairly easy if they had a freaking system in place. I went to their store and the lady started looking for my files. She went to a networked windows drive (yeah!) and then started looking for folders manually and tried searching for Muziboo Files. The records had no other indexing. They were not even using google desktop. After sometime she gave up and told me the same story of software deleting the files. I got mad at this point and the manager and another guy came over and told me how they delete the files for privacy concerns. So they keep the files for 3 months and then suddenly the privacy concern kicks in and they delete the file. They never ask the customers if they can save the file in the first place. After all this, I had to get the card redone again because there was no way to restore the file, wait for 2 hours and then get the cards printed. All the cards had smudged edges but thats another story.

I have a few questions to the printo management

• The store is not cheaper than regular printing press. There are no processes that are helping in cutting costs or improving the convenience of the customer. How are you redefining the offline and online printing scene?
• Regular printers keep the files for a long time and all I have to do is to call them up and they reprint my order. Why is printo so inefficient?
• Why are people who pick the calls so clueless?
• Sorry to sound like a broken record but with no processes in place where is the innovation. Your people can’t even find a file easily in one store. Leave apart integration between stores and the ability to reorder stuff online.

All in all I don’t see why printo is better than the printing press next door. They plan to start 250 stores by 2011. May be they should try to write some Software by then too that can help them manage stuff better and provide customers a better experience.

Popularity: 11% [?]