Hello All,

I am a new associate manager in customer service to my organization. I have worked for this company for the last 3 years and worked my way up to management. I have recently been placed in charge of our claims department. The company I work for is a national company that produces ads for small to international size companies. Currently we have a process in place that does not benefit our customers and I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions.

What happens is we publishing an ad for a customer and something is wrong in the ad. The customer calls my department with their issue and we open an "investigation." This process takes usually 10-12 business days to resolve, because we do an investigation to find where the error occured. Once we discover where the issue occured we call the customer back and offer somekind of settlement (adjustment off their bill).

I am currently looking into different avenues that would streamline this process. Honestly we are not benefiting our customers with our internal investigation. If we know it is not the customer's fault then the customer should not have to wait that time to hear a response.

I was wondering if anyone had any ideas of how to implement a process of streamlining where the customer receives a quicker response. The main issue is that we still need to do the investigation for our own quality complaince.

Please help!

JH

Sorry for the typos I was trying to hurry this post as I am up against a deadline.

JH

J-

I agree! Why should your customer need to wait to have items fixed or some sort of settlement paid when you are currently aware of the problem being internal. Customers are the backbone of the company. Of course the customer is not always right, but possibly in some cases they are, and straining a relationship with a wait period could cause the customer to leave. May I suggest that if you are going to have to spend the time doing an internal QA, and see what departments the problem originated, why not give a "provisional credit" on the outstanding bill. This can be done simply much in the way that banks handle unauthorized charges. It is explained that the provisional credit is there for the duration of the investigation, and upon completion either the customer was correct, meaning they recieve the credit, or the customer was wrong and you take the credit back. Make sure to state this all in your disclosures!!

Best of Luck,

Kristina

Hi

If you know there is a problem, then it shouldn't take that many business days.

Here are my suggestions:

Set the resolution time frame to no more than 5 working days (people can relate to that much easier than double digit days)
Offer them a discount on their next bill/advertisement.
Try to keep the debit/credit notes and invoices to a minimum, we are CS people, not accountants.

Gary