Proactive service, driving your clients

Proactive service, driving your clients

I recently attended a screwup, at a funeral on top of it!

The obituary in the paper said the visitation would begin at 10:00am while the funeral home had the schedule down for 11:00. People were standing in the hall for 45 minutes before they opened the door!

So where was the first failure?
Obviously it starts when the funeral director hasn’t noticed that an obituary has been posted with the wrong time!
Next the staff hasn’t been notified that people will be arriving early.
The family wasn’t made aware that people would be early.
The room wasn’t ready until the last minute.

I come from a school of thinking that how to organize something starts with the end result in mind and the time you want to finish as place we begin, or said otherwise we start with the end.

So in this case I would go like this.

11:00 am doors open
10:30 am everything is ready
9:00 am call family if something is wrong
8:00 am staff arrives and begins to start preparations for the day
Previous day, verify all the obituary ads, online and paper to be able to anticipate the schedule for the next day!

So now I have to capacity to anticipate that my schedule the next day will be inadequate because I know, before people show up at the door that there was a screw-up and I can accommodate my clients so that the problem is extenuated and so even if I can’t accommodate people in the room that they are supposed to be in they are not milling around in the hallway because people are already in a delicate emotional state. If someone melts down in the hallway everyone is uncomfortable.

It’s not hard to be proactive but it does take a plan. And a desire to be so things in the best way possible.

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