DO YOU HAVE AN EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE AND SUPPORT MODEL? (PART 2)
INDUSTRY STANDARDS
Companies that achieve total marketing domination often set their industry standards – especially those related to customer service and customer expectations, such as product evaluation periods, warrantees, and return policies.
Step 3: Identify any production issues that may impact your business.
If a customer cannot acquire a product that they need form your company, they will be forced to do business with one of your competitors. Companies that achieve total marketing domination maintain the highest possible customer service level.
The “Production Issues” worksheet will help your company evaluate its ability to deliver its products on demand.
PRODUCTION ISSUES
| Do you have adequate production resources? | We want to bring most of our printing in-house over the next two years. |
| Personnel – specify areas that are understaffed. | Our training guide production group is understaffed. |
| Equipment – describe production load limitations | We can seat only 20 people in the main training room. |
| Describe any capital (mission critical) equipment nearing the end of its useful life. | Our network laser printers need to be replaced within six months. |
| Do you have backup plan for equipment failure? | We need additional portable printers and computer presentation equipment.We do not have an adequate disaster recovery program if our main file server crashes. |
| Inventory Control – describe your inventory control system. | We are running Inventory Management software on a windows/NT server that is connected to our LAN. All of our training materials are warehoused at our South East and North-central offices. |
| Do you have a backup plan to obtain products or supplies that are difficult to obtain, on allocation, or provided by a sole supplier? | Our Production Manager is working on a detailed purchasing plan. |
| Do you have any plans to improve your inventory control system? | We plan to begin bar coding all our training materials next quarter. |
| Shipping/Warehousing – describe your shipping procedures. | All materials are shipped from our sales offices directly to our customers. |
| Do you experience any shipping difficulties shipping product during peak periods? | No |
| Do you have any plan to improve your shipping procedures? | Yes. Bar coding our inventory will help us improve turnaround time in our warehouse. |
Step 4: Identify any production issues that may Impact your business
Companies that achieve total market domination control their customers’ experience by implementing processes and procedures to help them maintain the highest possible level of product quality and customer satisfaction. Quality is what your customer say it is!
QUALITY CONTROL ISSUES
| How does your company ensure the quality of its products? | First, we do not let any trainer present one of our programs until he or she has gone through the program at least four times with one of our senior trainers. One of our managers sits in 0on each trainer’s seminars at least once each quarter. After the seminar, our manager gives the trainer a written evaluation that details any improvements or curriculum changes that he or she thinks should be made to improve the quality of our product and the effectiveness of our trainer’s presentation. We also solicit customer feedback with customer feedback cards, customer questionnaires, and personal phone calls from our senior managers, and then pass the feedback along to whoever is involved inside our company. |
| How does your quality control compare to your competitors? | We believe that we put more effort into ensuring the quality of our product than any of our competitors do. |
| Are you ISO 9000 certified? | No. |
| Would ISO 9000 certification help you market your products? | We believe it would, but we have not researched this yet. Some distributors we have talked with have asked us our plans. |
| Do you have a plan in place to become ISO 9000 certified? | We are considering getting certification for our documentation group next year.If we decide to work toward ISO certification, we will hire an outside consultant to help us through the process. |
Promoting A Quality Image
Developing a quality image is an important step on the path to market leadership. Most companies promote their image through customer testimonials, reports from objective industry analysis, and through compelling explanations of exactly how and why their products deserve a “quality” reputation.
Most companies believe that they can use the quality of their products to promote a quality image. However, to use your product’s quality to differentiate your products from your competitors’ products, you must be able to demonstrate a significant difference in relevant purchase factors, such as performance or reliability.
For example, advertising that your company warrantees its paint for seven years is not very compelling if your competitors offer a six-year warranty on their paint. In this situation, it would be more compelling to choose a much longer warranty period, say twelve years, or to match your competitors’ warranty period, and differentiate your product’s quality using another purchase factor, such as color retention.
Companies that achieve total market domination use their customers’ key purchase factors to help them position their products as having exceptional quality. In most selling situations, it is easy to map specific purchase factors to your company’s products and services. However, in some selling situations, customers’ key purchase factors are nether intuitive nor obvious. For example, many fast-food customers are as concerned about the cleanliness of a restaurant as the taste of the food that is being served. So fast-food restaurants must maintain an exceptional level of cleanliness to achieve a quality image.
Part 3 continues in the next article
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