By Jackie Evans, Customer Service Manager
The Customer Service department has become a much busier place as the club has grown over the years.

The way we operate has changed as well in that time. I've been here for 13 seasons now, and since then fans have become more distant from operations. In a way that's inevitable when a club experiences the rapid growth we have. As much as you'd like to be closely connected to each and every fan, it's much more difficult to keep that personal relationship with a particular person when you are trying to help so many people.

We do have a lot of people we are in regular contact with. But it's not as easy to be out there and be seen and known by everyone as it was at Elm Park when we had a quarter of the amount of fans as we have now. That doesn't mean we care any less, and we still try to do the very best we can to help any supporter's query, even if you can't always make a change to resolve it completely.

It gives you a buzz when you get a letter saying something you've done is a big help to them or has made their day. People are passionate about their football, and we understand that. It costs a lot of money to follow their team and go to games. People have a choice where to spend their hard earned cash, and we must always remember that.

We actively seek supporter's comments, and feel they help us in addressing issues in regards to customer concerns. We can't go forward and change things if we're not aware of the issues people might have. We always listen to those comments, and where appropriate, we'll make changes.

At the same time as getting feedback on complaints, we also get a lot of praise for the club. Some people are very willing to tell us when we're doing something well, and that is equally important. I think that a lot of people are aware of our existence now, and that's good because people feel they have somewhere to go to get their views heard.

When we introduced the no-smoking policy we had great feedback, both from smokers and non-smokers. People were largely in favour, including smokers. They were pleased we introduced it and more were for it than against.

Most of the time a complaint it just a little niggle, where a fan has spotted something they feel could be done better. But one person's idea of minor could be another's idea of major. For example, someone might come and say their seat needs cleaning or is slightly broken. So they'll come to us and point it out. It might be a minor issue, but we have to have those comments on board. Only by using the fans as our feedback can we know what people want, what they think doesn't work and try to get a solution.

As the football club has grown, the structure of the company has too, and everyone who works here falls into a specific department. But there are lots issues which fall in between or affect a number of department, and it is no one person's responsibility. So we tend to be the department that picks up all of the issues, it could be information on buses to ticketing, catering, merchandise, everything really.

We need to be aware of everything that is going on in relation to the football club. With Christmas coming up it will be a busy time for departments like the Megastore. We want to make sure that everyone who orders with us gets their items before Christmas. We are really trying to be proactive where possible, and try to see where things might go wrong. If we can keep doing that we can minimise problems.

We are able to track things with the new Customer Relations Management system, now that it's up and running properly. As soon as a customer contacts us, their customer number is really important, so have that ready. We put that number into the system and know exactly who we're talking to. With us becoming a bigger organisation it helps to be more personable with the supporter when we're coming through, because you have their supporter history in front of you. You can see how long they've been a customer, track all their previous correspondence and issues they may have raised in the past. That can help in your response, especially if they're raising something they've mentioned before.

There are a number of ways to get through to us. We take letters, emails, phone calls. I'd say 90% are emails, but there's no one way we prefer. Sometimes it is nice to talk to someone and we'd always encourage that. We like to talk to people. Very often if a fan comes through via email the content can be so long and it's quicker to deal with via a conversation.

But it's definitely better for a customer to contact us though, rather than registering their complaints on websites or forums. If they don't raise it with us directly, we can't help directly. If you really want someone to listen and make an effort to solve the problem, come to us, it's what we're here for. Even if we had time to trawl the web to find out the problems, there is no way of telling who is making the complaint, and it makes it much harder for us to find out where the problem lies. We aim to turn around a response as quickly as we can, and 90% of queries get responded to within seven days.

We have mystery shopper visits two or three times a season, and are always looking for supporters to take part in them. It's very simple, we want fans to complete a questionnaire before they come in, go to a kiosk and buy an item of food and give us the feedback on it. We then get a report from an independent company and that helps us make improvements. We've done that over the last few seasons, using our own fans. So we're looking at all fans from various age groups. Everyone's opinions count. So if you're 7 or 70, we'd like to hear from you.

We want people to have a good experience at Madejski Stadium and we can only learn from this if we know what the issues are and how many people are affected. So get in touch, no matter what your feedback might be. Our phone number is 0118 968 1211 and email is customerservice@readingfc.co.uk - we look forward to hearing from you.