I recently came across a financial awards program promising tens of thousands of dollars of cash for animal welfare organizations with good "customer service." Sounds great, right?
We probably all agree that customer service is critical to successfully engaging the community, and encouraging them to donate, volunteer, foster and adopt. There's no bigger turn-off when dealing with any organization than to not receive a response to your email or telephone inquiries.
I'm sure everyone that is active in the volunteer animal welfare community also agrees that customer service is very difficult to maintain under the stresses of life -- balancing a full-time job, family responsibilities and then keeping the rescue running in your spare time.
Somewhere in the process of defining good customer service, the coordinators of the give-away I mentioned decided that you'd have to answer the phone when it rings to be recognized as having an acceptable level of customer service. That criteria might work fine for organizations with a physical shelter and dedicated staff, but did you know that the animal welfare community is mostly made up of home-based foster organizations?
So how can you maintain good customer service even though, realistically, you can't answer the phone when it rings?
The RescueGroups.org Voice Mail service can help you manage those voice mail messages by alerting you via email or page, and even delivering the voice mail recording directly to your email inbox or cell phone. You can have multiple volunteers responding to messages in nine different mailboxes -- the messages can go straight to the responsible volunteer -- now there's good customer service!
So, ultimately, you shouldn't have to be a super-star organization with a physical location and dedicated staff to answer the phones in order to have stellar customer service. You only have to find the right tools, and the right partners! We hope you decide to partner with us.
- Richard