How did you impact the customer experience?

1 St experience

During my 14 years as customer service manager for a Texas folding carton manufacturer, I had never encountered such a serious supply chain failure. We supply national distribution centers with fast food cartons, custom printed for a national chicken restaurant chain. The distributor ran out of safety stock in two days, while our railcar was stuck in the mountains due to a train derailment. The back up road team drivers also ran into a series of unfortunate events. When this first started, management was resistant to my suggestion of air freighting the cartons due to the cost. As days went by, the customer was threatening the entire account if their restaurants ran out of cartons to serve their product in. To make matters worse - it was Thursday before Memorial Day - their second highest sales weekend. It appeared the entire Pacific Northwest down into Southern California was going to be without takeout chicken. Now it was too late to air freight, and the DC would not be able to hot-shot deliveries everywhere -- oh why hadn't they listen to me? My mind raced as I though of the church events, the family picnics, and the loss of our account of many years. The pressure was incredible and the matter had escalated to where every VP, President & CEO within these organizations was screaming for answers.

First, I scraped together our safety stock, called in favors, pushed out other customer's orders and sent a third truckload out. Second, I rallied every available person -- there were 7 of us -- and with a list of over 300 restaurant locations, we hand wrote FedEx labels and sent out mixed orders of 1 to 5 boxes of folding cartons directly to the restaurants. We are located in the country, so I recruited our managers to become our rural route drivers. Using their personal pickup trucks and in shifts, they delivered the packages to the FedEx drop off site.

I spent the entire holiday weekend sending the buyers, VPs, Presidents and CEOs email updates with a map tracking the third trucks progress. I also tracked all the FedEx shipments. Out of over 1,000 packages shipped, only four stores did not receive their cartons until the Tuesday after Memorial Day. The Chicken Gods were with us -- those stores did not run out of cartons and we enjoy being their supplier still today.

2nd experience

I work in the technical support department for a cable company. Our company is experiencing an issue with the IPG (Interactive Program Guide) losing information on converter boxes due to a new feature that was added. The new feature is called iTV (Interactive Television). When a customer uses the iTV or EOD (Entertainment On Demand) the IPG will lose information. There was not a lot of advertisement done for this feature and most of our customers do not even know it exists.

I recently had an irate customer on the phone whose IPG was not working correctly. She immediately started yelling and screaming, saying she was not happy with the level of service she was receiving and that she had been having problems for about two months (the same time that the company added iTV). I apologized, and started to probe her for how she uses the converter box. I asked her if she ever uses On Demand (Channel 1). She immediately got defensive and started screaming that she does not use our EOD service because she goes to the movies. I attempted several times to calm her and explain that I was just asking some clarifying questions so I can better explain to her how to avoid this frustration. I then asked her to access the iTV service and asked if she ever used it. She started screaming about not wanting any extra stuff, that she never asked for this service and we should take it off. After apologizing several times and explaining why her IPG was not working, I was able to help her understand that the iTV offers her local movie listings for when she wants to go to the movies. She stopped yelling and said "Well I hope you are prepared to spend some time because I need a tutorial on this feature." I explained how to access the feature and showed her several different options to retrieve local movie listings. Her closing comment was "Wow, this is a great feature...I will use iTV more than the IPG."

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