A compelling story of telecommunications upgrade for her business will soon put Joanna Puritz in the national spotlight.
Puritz, owner of Wilmington’s Printworks, responded to what she thought was a routine survey by Time Warner Cable Business Class, checking up on her experience with the company’s installation of new service for her company. In fact, the request was what Time Warner refers to as a “casting call.”
Time Warner contacted a number of its business customers, asking them to tell the story of how Time Warner Cable Business Class service made a difference for them. It chose four of the most striking accounts – Printworks' among them – for use in upcoming online and television promotions.
“Our customers can pretty much tell the story better than anyone else; they can describe what they were looking for,” said Patrick Paterno, Charlotte-based director of public relations for Time Warner Cable Business Class. “We serve small, mid-size, all the way up to large businesses, and they all have different needs, but are all dependent on technology.”
For most of her 10 years in her distinctive polka-dot building on Wrightsville Avenue, Puritz had put up with the vagaries of getting 21st century technology to work with mid-20th century telecommunications wiring. Her phone and Internet provider told her it would not extend new infrastructure to her building.
“We had trouble with our phones, which would go out,” she said. “Customers would call us on our cell phones to tell us they couldn’t get through. Personal attention to our customers is one of our big things. We always want to have an actual person answer the phone, so that was a real challenge for us.”
Although Puritz had assumed she couldn’t do anything about the situation, she did call Time Warner when she noticed one of the company’s trucks parked nearby, asking if the company could supply what her existing provider could not. The company was able to run new wiring and equip Printworks with the telecommunications infrastructure it needed.
That was about 18 months ago. Since the TWC installation, Puritz said, the phones have never been down and Printworks’ Internet service has been both faster and trouble free.
Thus, Puritz’s enthusiastic response to the “survey,” detailing the real improvement TWC Business Class service had made in Printworks’ business, landed her story atop the company’s pile of responses.
The result? A crew and TWC marketing personnel are filming at Printworks for two days this week, creating footage that will be used as an online testimonial and in a TV marketing campaign scheduled to launch in June. After filming wraps here, the crew heads north to Brooklyn, and then to Cleveland, Ohio and to Norwood, N.C.
The spotlight will be a perfect 10th anniversary gift for Printworks, said Aubrie Sheaffer, a Printworks staffer for four years.