Tuesday, May 4  

What would you do?

Howdy. Hope you've had a good day.

Being in business, I'm aware of the costs of running my little business here on the Gold Coast. And I'm also aware, as I'm sure regular readers would know, of the importance of fantastic customer service.

Now, our fax machine goes fairly constantly. On an average day we'd probably receive 15 faxes. And that chews up the roll of film stuff that the fax machine uses. It's $14 a roll.

Today the fax machine was working away as usual and we didn't really take too much notice of it. We grab the faxes whenever we are walking past the machine.

Today the paper had run out and I tossed some more in (it's a plain paper fax).

Mel went to a lunch meeting

Mel had attended a networking function for a women's business group about 2 months ago. The last fax on the machine was an invite to their next function. Anyway, I put the fresh paper in and left the machine alone.

Another 120 pages of faxes spewed out. These were faxes to the database list of the women's business group. They'd obviously messed up their faxing and faxed the entire list of invitations to our number.

That wasn't great for our machine. (And I couldn't delete the faxes as I couldn't be sure that clients hadn't been faxing through important information.)

120 pages. That's a full roll of my fax film.

I called the organisation and mentioned they had faxed all of the invites to my number and they'd better make sure they also sent the faxes to their list correctly.

"Okay, we will. Bye," said the person I spoke with.

What would you do?

If you were the people who'd inadvertently faxed me through 120 pages of faxes, what would you do?

Here's some hints

I'm left with 120 pages of wasted paper. A bill for $14 for the fax roll. The cost of the telephone call. And probably 15 minutes work dealing with the faxes. And I'm annoyed (you could probably tell that!).

Here's what they could have done:

1. Apologised
2. Found out what sort of fax machine I have and buy me an extra roll or 2 of film
3. Sent me a ream of copy paper
4. Sent me a small gift to say "Sorry for wasting your time and thanks for alerting us to the problem."

Providing great customer service is a matter of tremendous importance for any business. Think outside the square. Think of how your systems and practices impact on others. And make sure that experience is a positive one.

Cheers

Brendon