Woot woot!!! Giving a quick cheer to my team for being recognized for the 2018 CASE Circle of Excellence – Innovative Alumni Programs. We picked up a silver for the work that we’ve been doing on customer engagement. Way to go team!!!
As soon as we received word that we’d won, I found a hot day and took the team for ice cream. Thank you Emack and Bolio’s.
The process has been hard and was met with a lot of resistance from my staff. I was asking them to do a few extra steps and held fast to the belief that replying to an email without any other action is not ok. I was firm in my expectation that they look up every constituent who contacted us to verify their information, make any updates to our records based on their signature line, and include in the record the full correspondence. They found the new process to be tedious and clunky.
We tried different things, found some shortcuts, began to notice how frequently we were writing the same thing again and again and again. We found we could cut down on time by creating templates. And then we got our first call from an alum who we had been emailing back and forth. She was having a difficult time creating an account. John looked up her record and could see the entire email thread with all of the suggestions, and issues, that had come up along the way. Because the information was in one place, he could see what had been done to troubleshoot and offer alternative suggestions.
It was one of our most rewarding calls.
Not only because we were able to efficiently help her, but because her call reinforced how important the work that we were doing was not only helping our alumni but ourselves. It had finally come full circle.
When I started managing the help desk, the worst calls were the ones from our alumni who had trouble setting up their accounts. Often they had emailed back and forth for days and then were asked to start at the beginning when they called. Calls lasted thirty minutes as we troubleshoot. Now we have templates with images that are used as both training tools for new staff and as a how to’s for our alumni. Login in calls have dropped to ten minutes and the frequency of the calls has fallen by fifty percent.
I’m extremely proud of the recognition we’ve received from CASE, but even more proud of my team and the way in which they’ve succeeded in making it a habit to provide great customer experience.
