December is one of our busiest times of the year. So when the snow started falling on Sunday, I started worrying we would not be able to get to the office to handle inbound Customer Service calls. Below is my account of Sunday night and Monday during Blizzard 2010, from a Customer Service point of view.
On Sunday night I really thought I would make it into the office at the regular time, until I went outside to shovel at about 10pm and saw the snow was coming down faster than I could move it. I was on the phone with Jake, one of our salespeople, and he was on a 7 hour journey from the Poconos to Brooklyn in the blizzard. I offered to have him stay at my house in NJ because he was going past it but he had already gone too far so there was no turning back. He wound up getting back at 4am, shoveled his car into his driveway, then got a text from me at 6am not to come into the office.
I called Michael, Head of Accreditation, at 3pm yesterday and said we need our key guys in
the office tomorrow because who knows how many people will be able to get in, in case we needed more Customer Service people. He took the initiative by sleeping by his sisters house just down the street from the 61 offices and played a key role in our CS today.
I woke up at 5am to find out no trains, buses, or subways were running. I then called our Messaging Service to see if anyone was answering phones there. I waited for five minutes on hold then emailed Christie, Head of Customer Service. She got the same thing. Not knowing what exactly to do, Christie set up a "Blizzard" voice mail greeting telling everyone to to wait 5-10 minutes and we would call them back. Perfect because we could not pick up calls directly from home.
Micah, Director of Video & Content Production, texted me at 8am saying he was going to get to the office or die trying. I told him he was nuts. But he texted me an hour and a half later saying he made it!
Jake woke up around 10am and called every salesperson to tell them what was going on and to get them on the phones. We gave access to the CRM and Admin. Jake then
forwarded all calls to people's cell phones in case they weren't already.
Christie, Trisha (CS), Rich (CS), Dan (CPE) and Rob (Sales) fielded the messages from home and got back to every customer today within 10 minutes. Not to mention taking care of all emails and live chats as well!
Monday was an epic day in Lawline history. To think we could have such a great day considering everything that was against us is phenomenal. Thank everyone for doing their part today and helping us to be successful. It is days like today that remind what a great company I work for.