Page 9 - CFESA Magazine Sept - Oct 2017

Looking for Calls to Action in Your Markets

by Dan Dibeler SERVICE
VIEWPOINT

We all know the busiest days of restaurants in our industry; Valentine’s Day, Mothers
Day, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and new year’s eve to name a few. During
these particular days, we become swamped in addition to the emergency calls we
receive. Our goal is to preemptively stay ahead of issues for good customers at
these times; however, we all have those clients that contact us after hours, on the
weekends, or in the middle of the day with a “fryer” down.

Wouldn’t it be nice to get ahead of these before it’s an emergency or our dispatch-
ers have to completely reshuffle the day to handle these instances especially on the
high priority days? And shouldn’t we identify ahead of time the high priority days in
our markets?

At K&D we have a particular market where 8-10 times a year we have these high
priority days. For example, when Penn State Football has a home game 150,000 to
200,000 plus additional people arrive at the town of state college to cheer on the
Nittany Lions. These events cause rush time for all the restaurants, bars, convenient
stores, and whoever else is in the restaurant and service industry. Last season we
were swamped and would get more emergency calls then we could handle. We
would take care of our valued customers first, then do our best to get to whoev-
er else we could. It was a scheduling nightmare, and top notch customer service
waivered due to t the scramble, causing us to turn away potential good customers
because they weren’t at the top of our board.

This year heading into football season we have started a new approach, and have
seen stellar results. Every Monday and Tuesday before home games, we try to call
our top customers and preemptively schedule any service or maintenance they may
have been putting off. This way we can try to head off the emergency situations. We
start with our top customers and then work our way down through the others hard-
est hit by the volume, pizza shops, fast casual, casual sit down, and hotels. Our sales
and service manager make the calls and try to get in front of any issues. Allowing
us to be proactive with the best customer service we can offer. It puts calls on our
board that week and allows us to better manage the emergency calls that will still
come in but may enable us to get to those new potential customers and over all just
increase our brand strength in that market.

So far we are headed to our first home game this weekend. Of the preemptive calls
we have made, we are at an 81% success rate of getting a proactive call this week
(of the actual calls where we were able to get in touch with the manager/ owner/
decision maker). I feel this is going to be a huge success in this market.
I know not all of you will have a major event such as a college football game (or one
that has a stadium that seats 107,000 people), but I think everyone can identify dif-
ferent significant events in their markets that hugely increase the volume to their
customers. If you can identify these calls to action and pro-actively engage your
customer base, I believe it will have an enormously positive effect on your brand.

www.cfesa.com SEPT / OCT 2017 CFESA Magazine 9