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Analyst Team Reports

Delivering Legendary Customer Service

Tere Holmes (Moderator)

  • Identify who your customers are
  • Notions of customer service need to be imbedded in your culture
  • Find out from your clients what they need
  • $ to complaint department to be able to act quickly
  • Develop policies
  • Child’s week at summer camp

Maureen MacDonald, Canada

  • Appreciate diversity and practice inclusion
  • Five steps to cultivating positive relationships
  • Highly skilled staff
  • Responsiveness
  • Communication with families (e.g, web-based parent forum)
  • Develop healthy relationships and healthy interactions to promote collaboration
  • Supportive physical environment
  • Best practices that support principals of excellence
  • Tips for the day — relevant to the stages that the child is at to provide small bites for parents
  • Meet the expert sessions

Sandra Piccinini, Italy

  • To be well known is a responsibility
  • Have a cultural mediator to liaise with the family
  • Delivering legendary customer service includes helping to integrate communities, for example:
    • Improve the visibility of children in the community, (e.g., exhibiting their handiwork public places, such as decorations on the theatre curtain in the concert hall)
    • Help the community build its confidence in itself, and its ability to achieve its aspirations
    • Pay attention to new citizens and help them be secure in their heritage as part of integration — grandparents explaining history
  • Program identity is not what you are but what the outside thinks you are
  • Childcare center as a place where community rebuilds itself
  • Change the conversation — the immigrant is not a problem/how you look at it?
  • Children have 100 languages and school usually would kill 99% of them!
  • Reggio is example of community building with child focus — “it takes a village”

June Goh, The Netherlands

  • Observation that a child center can be the nexus of an information and service exchange network for the needs of parents; this can be particularly useful for expatriate communities
  • For good customer service, handling and resolution of complaints need to be shared so that staff will not be burnt out — all staff need to take responsibility to full solution
  • Key moments of truth: the staff must be empowered to support beyond normal boundaries when the parents really need it; this is the essence of legendary customer service

Pat Houlton (Provocateur)

  • Customer Service needs to evolve and change
  • Customer Service imbedded in culture, families and staff at top of inverted pyramid
  • How do we reach out the customer?