Features

Pinnacle Awards 2003
"Above and Beyond"

SynchroSERV Inc. provides Tenant Service Solutions for real estate organizations of all sizes. One of our clients, Bentall Real Estate Services, uses us to receive and distribute tenant service requests, and to measure service delivery against tenant expectations under their "ClikFIX" brand. One of the services that we provide to Bentall is booking the shared meeting rooms at the Bentall Centre. The Bentall Centre is a 1.5 million square foot office and retail complex in Vancouver, BC. The meeting room is available free of charge to the 250 tenants and 5,500 building occupants in the complex.

The meeting room schedule is administered by SynchroSERV, but is hosted on Bentall's network.

On November 21, 2002, it came to the attention of ClikFIX's (SynchroSERV's) Building Service Coordinator, Nicole Hadden, that there had been an error in booking the meeting room facilities... the tenant was certain that they had reserved the room, but the system showed a booking for someone else. This was more than just an inconvenience, because this tenant was hosting an Association meeting with representatives traveling en route from all over the Lower Mainland. Canceling or rescheduling the meeting was simply out of the question.

Thank goodness that Alison Turnbull from Kelly Services took the time to confirm that the meeting room was still booked for them. It didn't leave much time, but at least it alerted us to the conflict and gave us some time to solve the problem.

Nicole didn't bother to question whether or not the room had ever been booked. It didn't matter. Clearly the tenant believed that they had booked it, and that was good enough for us. Nicole could sense that Alison was upset and starting to panic, so she promised to take personal responsibility to solve the situation.

Upon hanging up the phone, Nicole jumped into action. She called the tenants who were booked to occupy both meeting rooms to make sure that they really needed the rooms... they both did. She called to see if there were vacant meeting rooms in Bentall's own offices... there weren't. She checked the SynchroSERV boardroom and any other space she could think of, but not a single vacant space could be found. At this point, a mere mortal might have given up, but that is not the SynchroSERV way. After exhausting every conceivable option in the Bentall Centre, Nicole simply expanded the possibilities - surely, she reasoned, there must be a room somewhere in the world - and she'd find it - period.

After brainstorming with the SynchroSERV team, Nicole had a new idea. She was aware that SynchroSERV's President was a member of a local business club, and she knew that they hosted meetings, the problem was that he was out of town and could not be reached. Undaunted, she contacted the club and managed to convince them to trust her enough to book the meeting, without direct approval from her boss - the member, and to book it for non-members of the club. Oh, and by the way, she needed this done now - right now. Not tomorrow or next week, this meeting had to happen in the next hour... and they need a nice lunch too. You can imagine the level of commitment that it took for Nicole to make all of this happen, but the interesting thing is that she did it all without approval... she didn't need to get approval. In SynchroSERV, our culture is absolutely focused on total customer satisfaction. Nicole knew that she could do whatever it took to keep this tenant happy, and that she would not only be supported, she'd be rewarded for this sort of behavior.

As it turned out, Alison was thrilled about the new meeting venue, however, there now was a new hitch. The cost of the catering was more than they had budgeted, so the change in venue was going to put Alison in a tough spot. Nicole, using her best judgment, offered to have SynchroSERV pay the difference, no questions asked. Needless to say, the meeting was a roaring success and everyone who was in attendance was very impressed with the facility and the lengths that ClikFIX went to accommodate them. In fact, they sent a thank you letter that went one step beyond a compliment, making the kind of statement that is music to a landlord's ears. Not only was Bentall's tenant delighted, but the other attendees made the statement that they were, and I quote: "so impressed that they would be sure to think of Bentall if they ever considered relocating to alternate office space."