CONNECT facilitates customer service feedback

Have you ever had such a lousy experience in a restaurant that you just wanted to smack the server upside the head?

Perhaps it happened at the corner grocery store or some other type of retail outlet.

You know what I mean — the clerk (or server) ignores you, or acts uninterested, or is unconcerned or oblivious to any discomfort or problems you may be having. It makes you want to scream.

That is how I felt the other night — my birthday night — the night the family decided to take me out for dinner.

We show up, all seven of us, at a local outlet of a national chain the night of the NCAA men's basketball finals. In other words, the joint was not crowded at all, which meant that there were extra servers and bussers all over the place.

And yet you would have thought it was the busiest night of the year given the lousy service.

How bad was it? Well, the worst part was when the seven entrees showed up in three shifts: two at first, four about 10 minutes later, and then the final entree (the entree for our youngest daughter) about five minutes after that.

It was ridiculous.

The worst part is that I'm sure the server was absolutely clueless about how I felt.

Me, I have no problem letting management know when I've had a bad experience. Dittos for exceptional service. And this particular evening, the manager (to her credit) was almost apoplectic at how poorly we had been treated, which is also why I am not going to rip on her or her establishment by name in this column.

That said, not everyone is as comfortable as I am when it comes to telling a company off or sharing a bad experience with a service provider.

Wouldn't it be nice if there was a quick, simple and non-threatening way to tell a company exactly how you felt about its great service or lack thereof?

Turns out there is.

Salt Lake City-based Mindshare Technologies helps companies do just that — provide customers with a quick, simple and non-threatening way to provide feedback to them.

According to company President and Chairman, Richard Hanks, Mindshare's solution is called CONNECT and that's exactly what it does — it connects front-line employees directly with their customers, the people they're responsible for serving day in and day out.

Typically categorized as Interactive Voice Response systems (IVR for short), CONNECT is a Web-based software program that can be set-up and operational in as little as an hour with surveys written and ready for customer feedback.

The surveys are created and stored on the Internet, and when a customer leaves a retail establishment with a purchase, the receipt has printed on it instructions on how to take a simple survey from a touch-tone phone, including a cell phone.

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