At Great Golf Memories, Customer Service is Our Craft
For over 20 years, we’ve been in the business of helping golfers preserve their great memories. It’s not just about selling them high quality golf trophies, displays, and memorabilia, it’s about celebrating the gifts that the game of golf (eventually and on occasion) gives back to those who play it.
As part of our company journey, we’ve had the opportunity to consider all types of customer requests. We always do our best to accommodate them, because we appreciate the game and those rare occasions when a golfer is blessed with a monumental event. We also appreciate how important golf is to families and friends, strengthening bonds and creating memories that extend beyond the fairways and greens.
In this blog, we thought we’d look back on some of the opportunities we’ve had to create custom golf gifts for our customers, and share some of our favorite stories.
It Only Takes One Good Shot…
Every golfer knows even their most dreadful round can still create a great golf memory. Whether it’s one perfectly played hole out of eighteen, or a superb stroke that erased the recollection of 99 others, one good shot is all a golfer needs to come back and do it again.
Read More: What to Do When You Make Your First Hole In One
Our first story is one of those tales, and comes to us from Jeffrey Rendall, creator of Golf The United States, a website dedicated to celebrating our national leisure through destination travel and equipment reviews. Rendall tells of an otherwise forgettable round at the Arnold Palmer-designed Classic Club in Palm Desert, California that created a memory worthy of “historic preservation.” We love his story so much, particularly his detailed recollection and the way he sets the reader up for the big payoff moment. Even though you know what’s coming, it’s a joy to see the memory retold through his eyes:
“Friday at the Classic Club was the last in our five-round annual family Thanksgiving golf get-together, and by that time, I had developed a rather ugly blister on my right ring finger. Warming up on the range (on a very cool desert morning), the blister popped – and the result was a painful sore.
I also wasn’t hitting particularly well on the practice tee.
In other words, the day began poorly and I didn’t play the opening three holes well, either. The sore was bothering me and I was yet to hit a solid shot in the first half-hour. Coming to the 525-yard (from the blue tees), par five fourth hole, I wasn’t optimistic that I would score well.” Continue reading…
Upon retelling the story to some friends after his trip, someone suggested he commemorate the memory with a golf ball display from Great Golf Memories. Rendall was so happy with the customized plaque we made for him that he interviewed our owner, Mercer Langley, in a story he published on his own website.
Golf Memories Are Our Craft… Literally
We are very selective when it comes to adding a product to our catalog. We make most of our products through our parent company, Eureka Golf Products, and everything we source has to meet our high standards for quality and construction. If we wouldn’t consider hanging it in our own home or clubhouse, we wouldn’t consider putting it on our site (no matter how well it would sell).
That’s just the way we’ve always done business. When we create a personalized golf gift for a customer, we want that product to live as long as the memory itself. And so customer feedback is really important to us. Believe it or not, we do read every single email and review that gets shared with us. In fact, it is this attention to our customers that generates great new product ideas as well.
Consider our golf club displays. We’ve always sold 6, 10, and 22 club models, and our 4 club putter stand has been one of our most popular items. But we kept hearing from customers who wanted a larger version of that type of stand. We also got feedback that the stand should have space to store golf balls as well, so we created a new 14 club version with a dimpled shelf on top. It has quickly become one of our best selling golf club stands!
While we can’t always create unique products for every customer whim (even though our next story is a heartwarming exception), we do listen and respond to popular requests. And we’ll continue to do so for as long as we are in business, because we know how important memories are to preserving not just the game of golf, but our love for it as well.
A Memory Worth Betting On
This is by far our favorite customization story. It happened in Christmas of 2013 when a grieving husband contacted us about a custom golf item to remember his late wife, who had passed away earlier in the year. She was fairly young, but throughout their relationship they shared a love of golf and played frequently together.
The gentleman had found some love letters she had written and asked our owner, Mercer Langley, if he could create anything special with them. We were able to take the letters and recreate her handwriting on golf ball marker poker chips, but it wasn’t easy.
“It took me tremendous time to edit the photos, but it was well worth the effort to make something so special,” said Langley when reflecting on the project. “The poker chips came out so well it looked like someone had handwritten on them.”
The gentleman was so happy with the poker chips that he gave them as Christmas gifts to his kids and family members. We are so touched that we could create something that helped preserve the memory of a loved one through the bonds of a common interest.
Going the Extra Yard
As mentioned, we make the majority of the items we sell in house, and that can be easier said than done. Especially when quality matters as much as it does to us. We’ve designed and developed over 250 proprietary products and more than 150 hole in one awards and have never cut corners to save a buck. When we decide to build a new product, we get involved in every last detail, like we did to create a golf scorecard album that would do justice to a round worth remembering.
The first challenge we encountered was sourcing a photo sleeve that could hold multiple sizes of scorecards. We took an inventory of over 500 different golf scorecards to determine the mix of sizes before we began designing a page that would work best for them all. And because the pages themselves were abnormal, we couldn’t use a standard sized photo album. So we evaluated more vendors than we can even remember until we found one that would make a custom binder to fit our photo pages. Then we went the extra mile to add a cutout cover to make a golf scorecard and photo album worthy of your living room coffee table.
Overall, it took us nearly two years to make this golf scorecard album, and we’re thrilled to announce the newest version which features a smaller profile. Plus, it’s got a price point that makes it a great golf gift for the gamer in your life.
Some business consultants might say we are silly to pay this much attention to details, or create custom items that only a few customers would buy. Maybe they’re right and our margins would be higher if we used cheaper sources, mass producing golf normcore without an eye for quality. But then we wouldn’t be honoring your golf memories in a manner consistent with our founder’s vision, and that’s not going to play.
Ultimately, we stand behind what we sell, and wouldn’t offer a product that we wouldn’t be proud to own. That’s just the way we do things here at Great Golf Memories, and we hope you appreciate it.