Customer Service. Your call is very important to us. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The bulk of my work is with small/medium sized nonprofits. In the vast majority their customer service is.....let's call it lacking. In many cases this is because of the monopoly nature of the nonprofit. If you need housing assistance, it's not like you can take your request to a different organization. Nope, you either deal with bad customer service or go homeless. Not optimal choices.
Seth Godin has a great post about customer service.
- Spend more money on this (and give it higher priority).
- Collect data about the nature of the calls...then fix the problems creating the calls.
- If it's going to take a while and you have to put someone on hold for lengthy, offer a simple way to be called back, and then make sure it works.
- If you're closed, give us the hours you are open.
- If someone leaves a message, ensure they get a call back within 24 hours
Rationing By The Queue is a strategy far too many nonprofits use in order to handle a heavy case load. In essence, it's making the process of receiving service so cumbersome that only the most dedicated will endure the labyrinth of procedure required to get the needed service. Bad customer service is just one aspect of this type of rationing.
We can change that....and the phone is a great place to start.
One of my pet peeves is documents written for clients in bureaucratic language that even I have to read two or three times to comprehend (sometimes never comprehending at all). This is usually accompanied by complaints from the case manager that the client didn't do what was laid out in "The Plan." Infrequently do they ask, "Am I making the instructions clear for the reader?"
There are now a number of good Readability Utilities online. I use this one. Just simply cut and paste your text...it will tell you what grade level the reader must have in order to understand what you've written. It will also flag difficult sentances and $10 words so you can see how to craft a better document.
This is not asking you to 'dumb down' your writing, but to recraft your words to make it easier for the reader to understand what you're trying to say. In the mid-80s I sat in a media symposium where New York Times editor Turner Catledge was explaining his decision to reduce the paper's comprehension level from 12 grade to 9th grade. His point was that even highly educated people absorb more information when writing is basic.
So go to Online-Utility.org and paste in something you've recently written. Then post in comments to tell us what you learned.
