There’s no sugar-coating the hardship that the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked over the past 12 months, but like many of you, we are determined to seize opportunities to salvage something from a year spent trying to sidestep a crisis.
And we have. We owe a huge debt to our customers for the fact that we have been able to weather a year like the past one. That’s no surprise really. Nor is the fact that it was our customers who pointed us to one of those opportunities.
It’s simple really: Last year, we opened numerous new channels of communication with our customers. We called, we emailed, we texted, we Zoomed. We sent newsletters and updates. It was important, we reasoned, to make sure we were transparent about what we were doing to keep our workforce safe and our customers safe in the midst of the Covid threat. If we had an exposure, we communicated it. If customers had any concerns, or preferences around how we made our deliveries, we wanted to know.
A Pandemic Upped our Communications Processes, and We’re Keeping Them
We formed a task force and held internal meetings to focus on what we were doing right and wrong, and how we could address the ongoing challenges. We developed a system for getting issues resolved more quickly. In short, we began doing a better job of responding to our customers’ needs.
Our customers noticed. More than a few have let us know how much they appreciate the additional contact, the regular check-ins, and a new system of online reporting, pandemic or no pandemic.
“We definitely got feedback from customers about the enhanced communication,” said Roscoe President Jim Buik. “It caused us to take a look at how we were communicating before, he said. “We’ve always had a proactive system but we’ve upped our game.”
Teamwork was never really optional, but in a pandemic, it had to be rock solid to get us through. Today, we are a stronger team because of it.
It makes sense. “The single biggest frustration for customers of our competitors is communication,” notes Director of Sales and Service Mark Stedman. That’s been true since long before any of us had ever heard of the coronavirus.
“If you communicate, even if there are issues, people tend to be okay,” Stedman says.
At Roscoe, our customers have always had numerous channels of communication, from the route service representatives who makes their deliveries to a dedicated inside customer service representative, to their district service manager.
But when we did even more? Our customers liked it. And we’re better for it too.
Teamwork was never really optional, but in a pandemic, it had to be rock solid to get us through. Today, we are a stronger team because of it.
Like all of you, we’re looking forward to the day when coronavirus is no longer part of our new communication processes. But we’re keeping the processes just the same.
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