One of our Client Advocates, Nicole Scott, was recently interviewed by The Customer Communicator newsletter for its December 2008 issue. That interview is reprinted here:

Customer Advocate Goes Out of Her Way to Live Up to the Role
Customer service people are called “client advocates” at VIA Data & Marketing Services, according to Stuart Balch, one of the owners of the company, “because we consider the client advocate to be our client’s advocate within the company.” And Nicole Scott goes out of her way to live up to that title.

VIA is a marketing and fulfillment company with a number of restaurant groups on its client list, and Scott helps to manage restaurants’ customer reward programs. “I handle the member services, and basically, when a customer signs up for a restaurant’s reward program, the information is sent to me. I process the data and mail the customers their welcome kits and any rewards they may redeem.” In fact, VIA normally mails award redemption certificates on a daily basis to restaurant patrons who have achieved certain point totals.

One evening, however, Scott received an emergency email about a patron who wanted to use his award certificate that night at a restaurant in Manhattan. VIA would normally send the redemption certificate by messenger in a case like this, but because it was after 5 PM and too late to arrange for a messenger, Scott decided to drive the certificate into the city herself. So two hours later, after driving into Manhattan through rush hour traffic, Scott delivered the certificate into the hands of the very grateful restaurant patron.

Balch adds: “It wasn’t one of those, ‘Hey Nicole, would you mind driving this in?’ situations. She realized there was an issue and did this without being asked to or asking if it was alright to do it. The client’s expectation would never be for us to do something like that.”

Scott also keeps an eye out for the client’s interests in other ways. Recently, she received a file in which there were several different redemptions for a gift certificate going to the same address but with quite a few different names. “That appeared a little odd to me, so I brought it to the attention of my client contact,” Scott says. “She did some investigating and found that a woman at a telemarketing company the restaurant company worked with was fraudulently redeeming the certificates.”

Scott says it’s all part of the job. “I’m very dedicated to making sure that everything I have to do for a client gets done,” she says.

Balch adds that Scott’s attitude is a reflection of the company culture. “We are a customer service company,” he says. “We depend on being better than everyone else and that’s how you do it. It’s more than just getting your job done. You have to be personally invested in making this happen.” Balch says he thinks everyone at VIA would go out of their way to help a customer. “I don’t know if they would get in their car without talking about it and drive into Manhattan to deliver a redemption certificate,” he says. “But they would be trying to find a way to resolve the issue.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of The Customer Communicator, the training and motivation newsletter for frontline reps. Additional information on the newsletter and related materials is available at the publication website www.CustomerServiceGroup.com.

© Alexander Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved.