A simple thought for today: We all want to feel like we are worthy of good customer service, sometimes it’s hard to get but if you’re lucky enough, it could make your day. So in return, provide the best customer service you can in whatever you do! I was going to ask for a hall pass for my blog this week because I had a family emergency Wednesday and missed the whole day of work. It hit me at 4:00am Thursday morning (sometimes my best ideas come with lack of sleep) though that my family emergency had some worthy discussion and why not blog about that. The details: On Monday my daughter mentioned that her eye was twitching and dry and feeling weird. Then the next day she told me that her lip was droopy. We decided to go see a doctor since she would be leaving for a Nicaragua service trip on Saturday. I took her to the doctor and she seemed to have symptoms of Bells Palsy, but it was a bit a-typical. Since my daughter was going out of the country, the doctor wanted to be safe and said maybe we should do an MRI. On what I asked – her brain she said. Three days before she was going to a 3rd world country, my 12 year old daughter was going to have an MRI on her brain. YIKES.. At that moment my world turned upside down and I started worrying. Did my daughter have a brain tumor, a blood clot in her brain or just Bells Palsy? Too many thoughts rushing through my head. Next step, get an appointment for an MRI at the local hospital imaging department. The doctor had written URGENT on my order so I thought in a hour or two we’d have an appointment. The appointment person told me I couldn’t get in until the next day at 3:00PM. Are you kidding me? My doctor just told me that my daughter may have something odd going on in her brain and you want me to wait until tomorrow. I took the appointment but decided to call another hospital not quite as local but still close enough. They were able to set me up with an appointment in 2 hours. Off we went to get my daughter from school and then to the hospital. All this time, I had been corresponding with my doctors office, her nurse and the insurance person. They were awesome in assisting with the appointment, oh yeah and remember health insurance. They had to get approval from my insurance company for the hospital visit and MRI. Within 30 minutes, we were approved for the process. Lucky for us, we do have great insurance but they dropped everything to make the calls. Very much appreciated! During one of my calls I asked the nurse about the results. When would I learn the results from the MRI? This is where the ball could have easily been dropped. She said sometimes you get the results in a few hours, but sometimes it’s the next day. Really? Can you ask that I get the results before the end of the day? I won’t be able to sleep and neither will my daughter if we don’t know something before the end of the day. She said, she’d do her best. So, we got my daughter checked in for the procedure and all along the way we were met with the nicest people. Maybe they are always friendly and cheery and try to make you feel like everything will be just fine, but they seemed extra nice. We were so lucky. Rather than have to wait the usual 2 hours when you go for a doctor appointment, we were called within 10 minutes of arriving at the imaging department. The ladies that were performing the imaging were very friendly and let us stay with our daughter until the last minute. So out we go to the waiting room…more waiting and I just kept hearing the imaging machine PING. The worst part of any doctor or hospital visit, the waiting. Before I knew it, they brought my daughter out and said she’s done. The nurse said the radiologist will call your doctor with the results and then your doctor will call you. Ok thanks and we left. Oh I wonder how many hours that will be I said to myself? To a mother waiting to hear about her daughters brain, not fast enough. We left the hospital and within 15 minutes my doctor called me with great news, her brain looks perfectly normal. What a relief! She was diagnosed with Bells Palsy..so she should be fine soon. OK – sorry if this was a long way to get to my point and perhaps a bit sappy for a blog, but I needed good customer service and I got it! Sometimes we take customer service for granted but I wanted to acknowledge how great it was to have an amazing customer service experience when I needed it most. The moral to the story; customer service is crucial to a good experience and if you want to keep people as clients, candidates, or employees…Make it a mission to always treat people like you would like to be treated, with GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE. Follow up when you say you will, be on time for meetings and be respectful of others. Everyone wins that way. I’ll leave you with this quote that I saw recently “Take good care of your customers, if you don’t someone else will”.
Excellent customer service, it’s what we all want.
