Quality. You want it. We want it. It's one of the most important words in our Gateway vocabulary and we all strive to deliver it to you, our customers, on a constant basis. The existence of a special team of quality assurance representatives for our customer service department is necessary to ensure that every single time you call our company for help, your expectations will be exceeded, and you’ll truly feel that you have a friend in the business.

It takes a very dynamic and astute individual to fill the shoes required to run this department, and Jeff Chatham has the proverbial dogs to fill'em. A former minister of 9 years, Jeff still preaches, in a way, but his sermon is now "Thou shalt treat thy customers as thou wishes to be treated." Jeff is the Manager of the Quality Assurance Department for Customer Support, and his main mission is to make sure that every single time you pick the phone up, whether it is to find out the status of an order or to get a replacement part for your computer, you hang up knowing that you've been taken care of to your satisfaction. We like to think that he and his team are making your experience a little better with every call.

"Change often does not occur until the pain of change is greater than the pain of remaining the same."

That about says it all when talking about this guy. Change is his middle name (okay, not really, but I don't actually know what his middle name is). An employee of 8 years, he's seen and experienced a plethora of changes, fortunately most of them for the good. I recently had the opportunity to chat with him, and thought you might want to take a look behind one of the many brains of the outfit and what he and his team of representatives are doing for our valued patrons.

Q. So, Jeff, what exactly is it that you do?

J. I'm the Manager of our Quality Assurance, sometimes called Customer Satisfaction team. It actually consists of three teams. Two of the teams do internal call audits. This means they monitor calls for Technical Support and Customer Service, and one team that actually calls our customers back to conduct customer satisfaction surveys.

Q. How many people work for you?

J. That varies, as we have some part timers, but it's around 25 or 30 people.

Q. How would you say your department affects our company and its customers?

J. It's important that our people know, from an audit standpoint, how they're doing. The managers can use the feedback given to them and their representatives for positive reinforcement or corrective action to improve the service to our customers. That has been the primary source of that kind of information from the past. But the newer team of the three, the survey team has been able to provide direct feedback from our customers on what they like about what we're doing and what they'd like us to improve. This has been the most significant change in our quality program. Right now, we're managing to accomplish hundreds of surveys per day.

Q. How do you determine which people get surveyed?

J. It's done at random from the information in our call tracking system. From a day before or three days before a replacement part is sent out, we take all of this data and feed it into a system called a predictive dialer. This system places the calls for us, and our survey reps conduct the surveys.

Q. How long has this department been around?

J. It was originally started about 3 1/2 years ago, but things have really changed in the last year or so.

Q. What's your favorite part of the job?

I think recently it has just been setting up the survey system and creating new uses for them, along with ways to improve them. It's just been a blast. It's really been fun to set that up and study the information we get directly from our customers. We get our customers' opinions, and not just our opinion, of how we're doing, and we actually talk to real live people making purchasing decisions based on their experiences with us. We've been able to find out some pretty neat things about what our customers like, what's most important to them, and other things we thought were pretty important but had no bearing on their purchasing decisions.

Q. What do the customers find important?

They will forgive us of all other sins if we just fix their problem or answer their question on the first call. The have indicated that this is even more important than (reasonable) hold time. But they definitely want us to provide them with a solution the first time.

Q. What's your least favorite part of the job?

I think, from a managers standpoint, it's just wading through all the paperwork. I like to spend my time with my people. Paperwork slows things down a bit, but I realize that it's the tedious part of a lot of jobs.

Q. Any hobbies?

With 3 teenage sons I sit on bleachers a lot. All kinds of different ball games. I enjoy playing golf, I have a pilot's license, I like to write, sing, I have a couple recordings, gospel and Christmas songs, mostly. We ended up selling a lot of tapes of our Christmas songs.

Q. Where would you like to end up in life?

This is a learning process for me. I spent 5 years in training and built up a department which consisted of just me until a couple years ago, and there's much about training and teaching that I really, really enjoy. It has some intrinsic rewards that I've especially found to be rewarding. I get to do some of that now, but not as much as I'd like. I enjoy being in the class room and enjoy even just the coaching side of that. The fun parts that I'm having with my job still involve that kind of thing. Being able to see down the road a ways and help people make adjustments to some of the changes you know are going to come--it's the only constant here. It's painful sometimes and it shouldn't have to be. I like to do some of those things.

You've seen the place get bigger and bigger with no end in sight, really. What do you think is the main factor in this?

Having watched all the things that have happened here since day one-- I think the strength (not to schmooze), the glue, that's kind of held GW together is Ted himself. I've learned a lot about business and life from Gateway and Ted. This is such an amazing place. I think the cool part of this is that in the early years we would go week to week just wondering if we'd even be here next month!. I think that as a whole, our organization had a feeling as to what we could become, and I always suspected that it was a common goal. But one day Ted finally said, "One day we'll be number one." A lot of people never get the chance to be part of something that's truly the best. To hold this kind of organization together this long, just the transition of the organization itself is something only a person like Ted could do.

Jeff continues in his quest to make this a better place to both work and to buy a PC, and I think he's succeeding to provide us with a role model we can all follow. Thanks, Jeff, for being one of the many movers and shakers of our family.



Back to the Newsletter
Back to the Support Page

Copyright © 1996 Gateway 2000 Inc. All rights reserved.
Please see our Legal Information. Please send feedback to Webmaster Central.