Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Ministry Services Retreat: Day Two

Aka. the day you should all be jealous of! 

Amazing!  Absolutely amazing.  I was so excited last night that I couldn’t sleep.  I was up every few hours checking the clock to make sure I didn’t miss my alarm… at 6am!!  For those who know me you know that’s crazy!!  But, my alarm did go off, I got straight up, and was at the workout room by 6:10am.  I ran for 30 minutes and lifted weights for about 15-20 minutes.  While I was running my hair tie didn’t want to stay on so I pulled it off and tried to put it back on when it broke!  Once I stopped running I spoke with the receptionist of the workout room (yes, the workout room had a receptionist, two actually) and she had a spare for me to use!  I was so excited that I had a way to pull my hair back and it felt like she was anticipating my needs.  Excellent customer service!

After I finished I came back to the room, showered and was ready for breakfast by 7:30am.  I couldn’t believe I was ready in a half hour!!  Something must be wrong! But, my batteries for my camera were all charged up so I took a stroll around the hotel and took pictures, which I will have posted as soon as possible.

Little side note about me that I learned… I like to take pictures, I just get nervous about taking them with people.  I feel bad asking them if they want to be in a picture!  How funny (or crazy) is that!  I am so silly sometimes!

Around 8am I met up with some of the ladies for breakfast and I have to tell you that of all the customer service experiences here (which have been overwhelming fabulous) this lacked even by Waffle House standards.  They sat us but then didn’t get us drinks for about 20 minutes. A girl can’t wait 20 minutes for her coffee! Hehe!  After that it took about another 10 minutes for them to get our orders from us.  When our order was finally taken the waitress repeated the orders back to us and two of us ordered their caramelized grapefruit but when the food came they didn’t bring it out. When we commented about it they went back and brought some out that hadn’t been caramelized… which was the whole reason we ordered it so they took them back again and when they brought them out the 3rd time they were burned.  I don’t know if anyone else has had burned brown sugar but I found out today it is horrible, it reminded me of pepper and I don’t think that’s what they were going for!  Since we had to be in a meeting at 9am and it took so long to begin with we didn’t have time to reorder so I still haven’t had a caramelized grapefruit!  But on a positive note, I ordered their French toast and it was amazing!! 

For the rest of the morning we were in our meetings (aka classes) and learning about customer service and how it relates to us.  They gave us a matrix to gage how we should think about our customer service and how to make it the best for our customers.  What I love out North Point Ministries (NPMI from here on out) is that they also practice what they preach.  At my previous job, which will remain nameless, they would preach great customer service but the management never followed up on it and the policies and procedures were only numbers driven.  I love that this environment really promotes excellent customer service!

At noon we were fed an amazing soup, salad, and sandwich lunch before being let free.  We had free time from about 1pm until 5pm.  Of which I spent the entire time at the pool!!!  It was amazing and I have a beautiful, glowing tan!  I am loving it.  I also loved that I was able to spend so much time getting to know some of the people at the churches that I am not always able to chat with!

At 5pm we headed out to dinner.  We had a choice of 3 options… I (with 37 others) chose Japanese hibachi!  It was as amazing as any other hibachi I have had.  I do love it!!  After dinner we had one more breakout session to further examine customer service and then we had a fun meeting.  The last few days have circled around the theme of NPMI University and everything has been geared towards ‘courses’, ‘curriculum’, ‘professor’, etc so for the fun meeting we had Homecoming!  We had different clicks (jocks, activist, student body, etc) and we each at to make a handheld float, have one person have a skill and perform one minute on stage and then answer a question, and have a chant that we did.  I was in the activist group and our theme was saving the planet so I chat was “go green, go green” and our skill was one of the team member read a poem. We had fun with it but every other group went all out and it was hilarious!  It was really cute! 

Of course afterwards I was back by the fire having a s’more!!  I can’t get enough of them this summer!!

I have the alarm set for 6am again tomorrow.  This time I am going to go for a run thru the hiking trails.  But, if I am going to have any energy I have to go to bed now!

Night, night!!

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