BL Companies | Client Care Orientation

Amazon Program The Amazon program began late in 2016 and developed quickly. The capacity of the architecture department was soon pushed to its limits and presented challenges related to meeting our commitments to other clients. The Amazon program also represented a significant expansion of our services in the warehouse/industrial sub-market of the Retail/Commercial/Residential market. Our initial introduction to this sub-market was through our work with FXG. This sudden windfall of work also arrived after several years of struggling to find work during the “great recession”. This also represented an introduction to a new market, and ramped up very quickly. This program required the commitment of numerous employees to dedicate extra hours of overtime and to work on weekends and holidays. In addition, it required immediate attention to manpower needs and resulted in a focused effort to find new employees that would allow us to increase our capacity. The Amazon program tested the abilities of our team to meet its Client Care obligations; specifically, we will look at three: Be Responsive: The rapid acceleration of the Amazon program quickly consumed our resources, and the aggressive schedules left no time to wait for answers from one another. We were challenged to keep up with our internal and external clients’ needs. To meet this challenge, the team worked extra hours and explored other ways to assist with the demands. This included sub consulting some of the work, providing some of the services in measured steps, rather than a single package, and discussing potential schedule adjustments with the client early in the process. The team was also careful to provide answers that were definitive and complete rather than providing responses that they weren’t certain of, or partial answers to simply defer the question, which is a dangerous practice and can lead to much more work in the future if the response results in errors or inappropriate actions. For schedules as tight as these, it is also important to respond promptly to emails, voicemails, and meeting planners. Responses to these requests were made as soon as possible, but never more than 24 hours after receiving them. At a minimum, a quick response to simply acknowledge receipt of the communication and provide a timeframe for when you can attend to it can be an effective way of assisting our clients to manage expectations.

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