A few recent encounters with the local office of my cable company prompted me to write this quick blog entry: the noon-1p lunch hour needs to be obsolete.
Integrated marketing communication includes everything from research and design to after-sales customer service and everything in between that goes into creating, launching, selling and maintaining a product and its customer base. The “integrated” part comes from the idea that each of these small parts – including minutia of customer service – play a big part in overall quality. And the noon-1p lunch hour goes against everything integrated marketing is for.
I’m very laid back in my management style: combining personal life with professional life needs to be easy, seamless, and good for both sides. So of course, employees deserve at least an hour for lunch; and the majority of the workforce takes its lunch breaks from noon-1p. It’s the common hour for lunch. It’s also a common hour for running errands (using our cable company example): paying your cable bill, closing your account, opening an account, asking for assistance.
Not being open during what could potentially be a busy time is anti-customer. In the world of IMC, the customer is the focus: rather than create a product and hope customers flock to it, we nip, tuck and tweak our product until it’s just the way the customer wants it. So, schedule employees so that someone is there during the traditional lunch break. Because that’s what customers want.
It’ll make things easier on employees, too. When my cable company’s staff members come back from their lunches, there’s always a parking lot full of folks who have taken late lunches in order to be at the office right when they know the employee will return from lunch. Put yourself in the employee’s shoes: You just had a nice break, ate some good food, soaked up some sun, you’re parking and…welcome back to a whole lot of folks to deal with who have been sitting there waiting on your to return. And you’re five minutes late because there was a wreck, and you were stuck in traffic. It’s not an ideal situation for anyone. Good news: it’s an avoidable one!
This is one small thing businesses can change to make life a little easier on everyone, particularly bricks and mortar businesses who deal with customers consistently stopping in and out of their offices.
abbymalikPR 
Customer Service! In the mid-seventies, Western Union solicited me to use their new phone service and asked that I return a postcard indicating my interest in obtaining Western Union as my phone service provider. I had signed up with Sprint a month and a half before Western Union got back to me. Western Union is no more. Sic transit gloria!
Thanks for the comment, John Henry!
When some one searches for his necessary thing, thus he/she desires to be available that in detail, so that thing is maintained over here.