If you work in any business and any industry, inevitably there will be situations that arise where it’s not so clear what the best course of action is. It could be about anything – a project, a client, or even a co-worker. It would be nice if everything that ever happens is cut and dry and easy to analyze and evaluate. But as anyone knows, life is rarely just “black and white”. There are multiple shades of gray. Which in itself is ironic, since we are a design and print studio – and we know all about “shades of gray” – all 256 of them!

So this is what recently happened. We occasionally outsource some of our work to a particular vendor as they do proprietary image processing. One of our clients specifically asks us to use this vendor – so we do. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from this vendor asking ME for some assistance. They had decided to revamp their website and create a brand new design from scratch. So they hired a company to redo it and they asked me to test and critique it and give them my feedback.

I have to say, this is one of those projects I like. You get to nitpick, criticize, and/or bestow praise, but no matter what, it’s all good. Yes, I was really looking forward to shredding and tearing apart fairly evaluating their beta site. So that’s just what I did. Their current site had been up for a couple of years already so they felt it was a bit stale. Personally, I thought it was just fine as is. Nothing spectacular, but it served its function. But I understood where they were coming from and the need to freshen it up.

The beta site was certainly fresh – it had a completely revamped graphical interface. Totally different than what they had in place. I guess they used a lot of FLASH content to get all of the fancy effects to work. Not bad. Next, I delved into the nooks and crannies – checking all of the site’s links and seeing what worked and what didn’t. It was a pretty good effort, but a few things caught my eye that I felt could have been done better. I took notes, and before long, I had a list of things that I determined that could be improved. It was certainly a serious and honest reflection of my experience with it.

I emailed the representative and reviewed my comments with him. The company was very appreciative of my detailed and thorough feedback. As such, they gave Intrigue a $75 off coupon on the next job we send them. Very cool!

Now here is where the ethical question comes in. Do we pass the savings on to our customer or not? Granted, this is hypothetical as we don’t currently have a project to send this company. But I pondered it for a bit. I do see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, we’ve always passed along coupons to our customer when appropriate. On the other hand, in this particular instance, we received this coupon from our own toil – which had nothing at all to do with the customer. It was a reward for the time I spent evaluating the vendor’s website. Therefore, we have no obligation to pass it along.

I discussed it at the dinner table as it’s certainly an interesting question. The consensus was that Intrigue is entitled to take advantage of the coupon and NOT pass the savings to the customer. An attorney friend of the family concurred. He said the same thing. I felt better knowing that we had a legal footing in this, should there ever be a question down the road. Nice…