Employee Spotlight – Digital Sample Technician

Meet Matthew, our digital sample technician. Learn more about our inkjet sample process for our UV printers and how our sampling process works with our customers.

MATTHEW: I’ve been with Inkcups a little over a year, started back in July of 2018. My role at Inkcups is a sample technician, a digital sample technician. Essentially it takes the role of completing samples, customer relationships, and far in between as well. The service that I provide essentially boils down to retrieving samples from a customer after it’s passed its beginning stage of salesperson-customer interaction. Then it will flow down to my jurisdiction where they’ll send in samples, I’ll conduct adhesion on these samples to make sure that we’re in line with Inkcups’ standards for adhesion and I’ll elaborate this to the customer and finally then send out print samples and send out samples for review by the customer. Typically that can take a matter of a couple days or it can take a couple weeks.

Typically, what I’ll do is I’ll start out by answering my emails and designate any action items for that day from those emails. Based on what the sample schedule is that week, I’ll usually tackle the first thing that’s on there. We have a queue that we abide by, that we follow. Based on where jobs are in that queue that essentially dictates where I need to put my attention. So, a typical day would be analyzing that queue and making sure that I’m up to date with necessary information that’s required for each sample job. So, there’s specific forms, there’s artwork, and there’s obviously the samples in hand. Making sure that those i’s are dotted, and those t’s are crossed is really important.

What I’m most proud of is definitely to hear back positive reviews from the customer as well as sample jobs that have been conducted or processed and you know I hear that we were able to lock down a machine purchase based on those samples. So, that is reassuring, making me feel like I’m doing my job correctly.

The main point that most customers don’t understand or don’t recognize as part of the processes is the rigorous and in-depth adhesion testing that goes into any and all of our sample projects or opportunities and I really think that separates us from potential other companies that are trying to do the same line of business just because I know that it’s very thorough what we do, and I don’t feel that we would send out a sample if I wasn’t confident about that sample job or I didn’t have that thorough testing that goes into that. I don’t think a lot of customers really recognize the background of what goes on during sample testing.

Depending on what market they’re in, if they’re in the promotional market or if they’re in more of a major brand market or any type of glassware, that would kind of tally up on what they would need for their adhesion testing. It’s pretty self-explanatory from the form we give them where we layout recommendations on what we suggest on where they should go with their adhesion testing. We’re happy to comply with whatever their needs are. I think some of the capabilities of our printers set apart our machines as well, like our mirror print, our second surface printing that we do on flatbeds and then the incorporation of high color as well. So maybe those should be touched upon a little bit more when we’re speaking with customers.

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