Extreme Customer Service. That title on a recent BusinessWeek cover really got my attention (so to did the guy bending over backwards with an Amazon box in his hands... a guy far less follically challenged than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos who is usually pictured in articles like this). And what I also found most interesting is that the various articles had comments like “when service means survival” or “keeping customers happy is more critical than ever” or “service champs economize on everything but TLC”. I thought: good, that all makes sense. Then there was the list of top customer service champs – all consumer facing companies from Amazon to Zappos.
OK, I get it, good. But I wondered why there were no manufacturers or aftermarket services firms on the list and that the bulk of the material focused on consumer facing organizations. What was missing was the Business to Business sector in which extreme customer service is so important now. Manufacturers and independent service providers have a heightened level of awareness of the need to provide extreme customer service in the current economic downturn. Maintaining current customers is critically important. The impact of the old adage that goes something like... it’s far less costly to keep existing customers than it is to get new ones... has been amplified by huge orders of magnitude in the last 12 months or so.
The end business customers (those that rely on the equipment they’ve purchased or leased to remain performing or to be service ready) are a fickle bunch. They’re paying for performance (up time) and expect it. Let them down, and they’ll start looking elsewhere for products that perform better or that are serviced better. So this challenge hits right at home in the field service and service parts logistics environment. Here our laser focus has to be on availability of technicians to provide service when needed and the service parts they require with them or within arm’s reach. In my experience, that requires two things; planning and execution. Planning as in making sure there are enough of the right parts in the right place, and execution as in making sure that those parts can be delivered from distribution centers or forward stocking locations to the point of use in time to meet the level of service commitments that have been made to the end customers. Oh, by the way, manufacturers and service providers are generally ‘for profit’ organizations (or at least they are not ‘not for profit’ organizations) so this extreme customer service has to be provided in a financially responsible way.
What I’ll be writing about in this blog are the challenges faced in this B2B extreme customer service environment and the creative ways that a laser focus on service parts logistics enables it... hey, I’m a service parts guy…John Wild
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