CEO's Column, 2nd Quarter, 2011
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Chip Emery, CEO |
Customer Responsiveness... Does Anybody Really Care?
As on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update… R-E-A-L-L-Y? R-E-A-L-L-Y!
Well, customers REALLY care. And they show that care by making loud, unpleasant noises when you screw up (regardless of whether it was your fault). Really? Or they quietly go to another supplier. And, no kidding, they get quite irritable when the product doesn’t show up when you said it would. And they become truly obstreperous when it doesn’t work out-of-the-box like you claimed it would. Really! And they get monstrously ugly if you don’t make it work now.
Here at Supply Chain Services we know all about loud, irritated, rightfully demanding customers. We couldn’t have been in business for nearly twelve years if we hadn’t made some mistakes. But by consciously and consistently holding ourselves accountable to resolving customer issues, those instances have become fewer and fewer. And our customer retention level has risen accordingly.
Some examples of our commitment to continuous improvement and customer care:
- We voluntarily pulled and replaced—at no cost to the customer—several hundred scanners at a major beverage producer simply because the devices had intermittent failures and the barcoding device manufacturer couldn’t fix the problem fast enough.
- When our tech staff was committed elsewhere, we hired an independent technician to replace problem units at a big distribution center over a weekend—again at no cost to the customer.
- When several state-of-the-art devices didn’t function perfectly on the loading dock of a large cold storage company, we got the top engineering staff of a very large rugged data collection device manufacturer to spend 4 days around the clock testing, identifying and fixing the problem.
So… who REALLY cares? Supply Chain Services does!
