Earlier this week, I set up a filing management system for our office, hoping to be able to centralize customer complaints and coordinate our responses. There are several of us who take calls and sometimes we found ourselves duplicating each others' efforts, or in other cases, working at cross-purposes.

Most of the organizational work was done in my head, thinking through the various arrangements and procedures; the actual setup was fairly smooth and easy, thanks to help from my two clerical people.

The results show that a modicum of effort in this area pays off big-time. The calls that have come in since have been much easier to deal with, the intake form simplified, and research of previous efforts on similar subjects facilitated.

How nice. We should have done this years ago.

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