A few years ago, I worked for one of the largest real estate firms in my county. Our office housed almost twenty real estate agents and brokers, and about ten support and administrative staff members. I was the lucky gal on staff who got to co-manage the front of the office, and handle the reception area. One of my tasks was to update our office's residential and commercial listings, and this had to be done about three times a day. Most of the time, it was easier for me to update the large book of listings kept on my desk, by hand. These listings also had to be kept up to date on the computer, in the Charlotte MLS, so our agents, and agents from other firms could have access to up to date information.

One day, we had a terrible storm, which knocked out our power, and the internet was down for an entire afternoon. You can imagine the mess we wound up facing the following day, when we were scrambling to update listings. Not only were all of the listings incorrect, the server was all messed up, and we had to wait on some of the IT folks from an outside company to come and rescue us. The week that followed had to have been one of the slowest work weeks of my life, as the server was slowly restored. I thought that my work would never be caught up to date, and we sure had a lot of goofs between agents and clients.

My boss, and the owner of the firm was a bit on the frugal side, and went with the cheapest plan he could get his hands on, even though he had an office of about thirty people, all needing to be using the computers at the same time. As much as the entire office relied on their computers, we at the front desks, really needed them to be working all the time, so we persuaded our supervisor to chat with our boss about new business internet plans for our office. Finally, after a meeting with the entire office, the point was made that in order to do business, and do it well, we all needed access to correct information, and we needed to be able to access it quickly, and easily. We had a major overhaul follow this, and everyone in the office was much happier because of it. That was a record-setting year for our firm in sales, and I still like to think that the support staff had a little something to do with that.

Have you ever dealt with service issues at work?