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Recognizing Customer Service

Earlier this month, Multi Service celebrated Customer Service Week. While The Payments Puzzle Box is not a customer service blog per se, I think this is an ideal opportunity to acknowledge all of individuals that play a role in the payments process.

Since Customer Service Week 2008, Multi Service has successfully launched three new payment programs. Earlier this year, special circumstances required that one program launch three weeks prior to the scheduled date. With only days’ notice of the change, I asked not only our customer service group, but also our underwriting and collections, systems, financial controls, program management, and operations teams what it would take to go live in less than 5 days!

I was ready for a reaction of disbelief, but within an hour we had a critical path and a plan to meet the new target date. The launch went flawlessly, and it was because all these departments worked together in a coordinated manner with a customer service-oriented mindset.

To be successful and achieve growth, it is imperative for a company to realize that customer service is not only the team that directly responds to customer calls. Customer service includes all of the personnel that work behind the scenes to take care of the customers. And in this situation, all the teams demonstrated their commitment to customer service.

 

Beyond the dedicated efforts of our behind-the-scenes personnel, our customer service team has responded to over 415,000 customer and merchant phone calls since last year's Customer Service Week. And, internally, our technical support group has resolved more than 8,500 work orders to keep customer-facing processes running smoothly this year.

 

That is a lot of people contributing to the purchase experience and a multitude of well-deserved Thank You’s. Though some of these groups may never have direct contact with customers, their ability to assess and fulfill customer needs from behind the scenes is as influential to the customer experience as your best marketing retention campaign.