Published 8:45 pm Friday, September 20, 2024 By Submitted Live United by Erin Haag Sometimes people can’t see the forest for the trees. At United Way, we gather feedback from our programs, most particularly the Welcome Pantry. Every time someone makes an appointment on the website, they have the opportunity to provide feedback.
Rosemary keeps track of this, and flags any that we need to address. They’re posted on a bulletin board in our “volunteer hallway” where our volunteers check in, access their lockers and check out what’s happening. While I’ve seen them collectively, I don’t always know who wrote what, so it really made me smile when she mentioned that one shopper makes a point of filling out the feedback each time with a little pep talk.
Erin Haag I was thinking about this forest/trees concept with something else and I noticed the board. I thought about a shopper who had provided feedback that there wasn’t enough food. They were frustrated that sometimes they came and there was a ton of food on the shelves and other times they came and there was “hardly anything on the shelves.
” This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this either. It’d be easy for many people to laugh and roll their eyes and move on with their life. Our work is about building relationships though.
Our model is a customer service model, and you can’t improve services without understanding what isn’t meeting expectations. So we dug into this and had a conversation. I asked the.