Getting the wrong cards from Moo.com was a good opportunity to find out what they are like as a company. Anyone can make a mistake, the measure of a company is how they react to that.

As a modern dot com business their selling is totally automated. You go online, click a few boxes, put in a credit card number, and later on something turns up in the post; no human contact necessary. But if anythng goes wrong, you prefer to know that there are real people behind it who can make decisions and sort things out.

In the past I have had good experiences (Amazon) and bad ones (Paypal).

So far the experience with Moo is encouraging. Their website has no phone numbers or email addresses, just a form to fill out. This is normally a bad sign, but I filled it out anyway. Almost immediately I had a chatty reply from a robot telling me that someone would deal with my problem within 24 hours, and today I had a reply from a real person.

Not only was it a real person, but from a real personal e-mail address which I could reply to if I wanted to. All too often replies just come from a generic customer services address with huge reference numbers to quote back, with standard text pasted into it. In extreme cases (Paypal) customer services send e-mails which cannot be replied to and if you want to follow up you have to go back to the website and fill the form out again.

But this was a real reply, offering to print some new cards and send them. Bear in mind that the cards were a free offer anyway. It certainly gives me a warm feeling and I would be confident that if I paid them money they would deliver the goods.