Complaint Review: Portraits International NW - Beaverton Oregon

Katie, I am sorry to hear that you had a poor experience with our company. We take unprofessional behavior by our staff photographers very seriously and appreciate it being brought to our attention. If you could contact us with your location and the date of your shoot we will address this issue with our staff. We can be reached at 888-689-1467.

We schedule our appointments in a way that allows us to provide satisfactory work but do at times get particularly busy when customers need to reschedule and we must accommodate. We apologize that you felt rushed or uncared for during your time with us. We take into account that people will be at their session longer than fifteen minutes, preparing before-hand and asking questions after and it is not our intention to have people in and out necessarily in that exact time frame.

We maintain the cleanliness of our clothes after every shoot day but know they can get overused during the day and are very sorry if the level of cleanliness during your shoot was not acceptable.

As far as pricing goes, we charge for the promotional photo and a sitting fee and that covers just your main promotional 12x18 print. The optional additional prints and poses can be purchased later if desired by our customers. The sitting fee and promotional price are always the same and cover all subjects in the picture. That is how we are able to maintain very competitive pricing. I am sorry if we did not make that clear. The CD includes a copyright release so that you can print your own photos, and the price we offer is standard in the professional photography industry, though we understand it is not the best choice for everybody.

We appreciate your feedback and our sorry that you did not have the StudioMax experience we aim for with all of our customers. We hope you will take these things into consideration and give us another try in the future.

Shannon, we could not agree more. We do not know who “Karma” is but they are not an approved representative of our company to comment here. Please do not take their comments into consideration. Thank you.

StudioMax NW

Alicia, we are so sorry to hear that you were not able to receive your pictures. The correct number at our office is 888-689-1467 and we include this on our paperwork. Although we service hundreds of customers a week across 22 states we strive to maintain contact with our customers whenever a problem arises and it is not ok that we did not do that with you. Although by now we no longer have your pictures we would like to offer you a complementary photo shoot and 12x18 linen print the next time we are in your area at no cost. Thank you for your business and we hope we can greatly improve your experience with us moving forward.

 StudioMax NW

There are way more than TWO unhappy customers and I plan to start spreading the word along with hundreds of other unhappy customers who were treated disrespectfully infront of our children by YOUR UNPROFESSIONAL STAFF. Please explain to me how anyon can get there pictures done in fifteen minutes. My appoinment was at 5:00. And the next was at 5:15. Giving us a total of fifteen minutes to complete the whole shoot changing and all. On the website it states it will take up to twenty to forty five minutes. It smelled of rancid feet from the clothing. This was my second time doing this hoping it would be different people doing the shoot. But it was the same rude people as before. Its is all over facebook of how many people just from my town are never returning to do these photos again. I purchased the 189$ package my first time for a total fo five pictures. This time around the photographer did 3 poses with two chidren I wil not abe paying the same price and plan to call and ask them to explain how they could charge me the same for three phtots vs the five last ime. And in order to recieve the CD I had no choice but to purchase the most expensive package as you do not offer it alone. that itself is a rip off. Especially for three photos. My youngest daughter was crying the gal doing the pictures was overly loud trying ot make her smile and almost scary. I would have cried too. Once I tried to get her to stop and the lady was telling me to "hurry up" and making "tick tock tick tock" noises as if a clokc was running... If thats not rude and unprofessional idk what is. By the end of our five minutes my daughter finally started to smile and lighten up and was ready for pictures to be taken but our total of fiftenn minutes was up. Any photographer knows it takes a good ten to fiftenn minutes just to make a child comfortable especially in such an uncomfortable enviroment. Being rushed like that makes any kid nervous. Ive called left messages. My whole family Did these photos 2 yrs back. NO ONE did them this yr and I remind you thats a loss of seven customers right there and each one said it was due to the rudeness and lies of time. The ONLY reason I did them this year was because when I paid for them we had a loss int he family . I did not make the appointment but kept ym receipt and was able to return and do them this time around . I will never again return. I paid 150$ for beautiful photos of my youngest daughter and it was a two hr session with a different photographer she was calm collect and worked with my daughter to make her comfortable and was cheaper! Let me remind you my daughter smiles constantly and is always happy. But even she could feel the uncomfrotable situtaion we were placed in. TOTAL RIPOFF!

I am a consumer, looking up your company as I search most companies online before I do business with them. Reading not the initial complaint, but your very nasty tone to the customer complaint, makes me very reluctant to want to do business with your company. If this is truly just a case of "the customer that fell through the cracks" then it says more to be empathetic, humble, and apologetic then it does to play the blame game, and take an ugly tone when your company dropped the ball. No company is perfect, I think we all understand that, but it sounds like this customer acknowledges she didn't follow the regular process due to unforseen circumstances, tried to reach out to rectify the issue, and got nowhere. Blaming her when the company clearly failed, and then being unwilling to admit it and take ownership of it without rationalizing and patronizing the customer only makes your company look petty and unprofessional. Basically your entire response only reinforces her complaint rather than counters it, and makes prospective customers think they will be talked to in the same condescending tone if they have an issue.

What would have been a better reply?

"I'm so sorry to hear that you had that experience. While we strive to provide excellent customer service 100% of the time, inevitably, there is an occasion where we miss an opportunity to delight our customer. On behalf of Studio Max NW, please accept my sincerest apologies, and feel free to call me on my direct line at 123-456-7890 so that I can try to rectify this situation."

It might be worth having some other people read your replies before responding to future complaints. Bottom line, your response did more damage to your company image than her complaint did.

 Let's look over the numbers for a second.  Just one promotion out of the thousands across the world we shoot about 30 sittings a day for about 14 days.  That's an average of 420 customers per promotion.  Now multiply that number by hundreds for how many reps are across the country doing promos.  Hundreds of thousands of customers.

 Your advice is this is a scam and don't give up your money. Really??  Out of the hundreds of thousands of customers we have three complaints and one of those is a bitter employee that was not qualified to do his job  and playing the blame game.

 So basically two complaints out of a few hundred thousand people.  That sounds like a pretty good deal to me.  Even though we strive for 100% customer satisfaction I believe there is a certain percentage of people out there that are uncontrollable  you to a series of misunderstandings. 

 I sure hope you don't ever plan on visiting Disneyland.  Because even though they are self proclaimed the happiest place on earth  you will find 35,000 pages of complaints from reviews over balloons popping and  every little thing you can imagine that the company can't even control.  Once again we have three. 

 Rather than try to steer people clear from a company that is doing a pretty good job providing an incredible service to the community at a more than reasonable price  you should reach out and let us try to help you feel better about the situation.

 Then you can be one of the hundreds of thousands of happy customers and not one of the TWO unhappy ones.

 I have been with the company for about five years and when traveling the country if I am confronted with a customer that things their photo session could've been done a little better and offers us the chance To do better I completely comp another Photo session to prove to them that we can do much better. In Five years that is happened twice.  I stand behind this company because I know what they believe in  and I love how happy people are to see us when we come to do pictures.  I truly am sorry for your experience  and hopefully in the future you will give us another try and see why  so many families love our picture so much. I mean after all you wouldn't become a vegetarian if you ate one bad piece of meat would you?  No you would not.