ADDING VALUE THROUGH SERVICE
Dr. Lawrence Steinmetz, a leading authority on getting top dollar for products and services, maintains value can be embedded in any product or service in one of five ways: Quality, service, delivery expertise, pricing strategy (high/medium/or low), and marketing and sales savvy.
Of Steinmetz’s five value-added strategies, for the ready-mix industry, service provides solid opportunities, but is one of the hardest to implement.
Who Provides the Best Service?
Every ready-mix company serving the 53172 delivery area asserts it provides great service. But conversations with several concrete contractors serving our community suggest levels of service differ widely – company-to-company, and operation-to-operation within multi-plant companies. Courtesy, order-taking skills, friendliness, scheduling and on-time delivery, employee attitude, technical support, driver skill sets, conflict resolution, and customer education are service areas identified by these contractors as opportunities to add value.
“You can set your watch by when Schmitz Ready Mix’s lead truck arrives at your job site,” shared one of the area’s premier decorative concrete contractors. “Other companies act as if my crew doesn’t punch in until their truck arrives.”
A powerful testimonial … yet every ready-mix company in Southeastern Wisconsin claims the service high ground. In ‘me too!’ environments, simply professing your company provides exceptional service constitutes empty rhetoric. But providing truly exceptional service experiences – on the phone, in face-to-face interactions, and on the job site – can set you apart from your competition, positioning your company as a preferred supplier, and resulting in repeat business, increased business over time as repeat customers grow, referral business, and lower cost of sales expenses.
As shared in last week’s post about adding value through quality, to implement value-added quality or service strategies, a company must demonstrate – quantitatively and/or emotionally – how and why your quality or service outpaces your competition’s … in terms meaningful and important to your customers.
Catch phrases and simple sound bites alone cannot do this.
Does your company track its on-time delivery rate? If it is better than the industry standard, promote it. What percentage of your new customers provide repeat business? How many customers have worked with your company for three years or longer? Five years or longer? Ten years or longer? Do you have second-generation customers? Third generation customers? Fourth generation customers (Central Ready Mixed, referenced in last week’s post, does)? What other customer service elements you provide can be tracked and quantified? How can you promote them in ways meaningful to prospects and customers? Do you share customer success stories and testimonials in your marketing and business communication … including in brochures, online, and in your project bids?
Continuity Across the Company
A second reason value-added service strategies are difficult to implement is company-wide service excellence is difficult to plan, install, and maintain. Keys to providing consistent, distinctive customer service include:
- Technology
- Effective systems for prospecting, sales management, bidding, scheduling, delivering and placing concrete, project follow up, and facilitating ongoing customer conversations
- Training (initial and ongoing).
The National Ready Mixed Concrete Association provides excellent seminars and training materials to help member ready-mix companies create and implement service continuity across their companies, including an outstanding certification program for concrete delivery professionals, which provides driver training in product knowledge, company and customer relations, environmental issues, safety issues, and vehicle maintenance and operations. Click HERE for details.
NRMCA also provides training for dispatchers, sales managers and representatives, and operations managers.
Multiple Listening Posts
A third reason value-added service strategies are difficult to plan and implement is service excellence is defined by what the customer considers service excellence. Prospect and customer perceptions are your company’s reality … and what satisfies or exceeds customer expectations differs – customer-to-customer – because needs differ, customer to customer.
Providing multiple customer listening posts – formal and informal – is key to identifying and satisfying (and exceeding) customer expectations. In addition to formal customer surveys (I recommend they be implemented quarterly to account for seasonal factors), ready-mix companies might consider setting up online forums, providing customer chat rooms, sending top management to the job site for real-time feedback, and implementing customer-friendly phone and face-to-face feedback systems for use by dispatchers, sales and technical representatives, and ready-mix driver professionals.
One company I work with does all of the above, and includes a pre-addressed post card with each ticket bearing the single word: “COMPLAIN!” The company has taken to heart customer research showing 54% to 70% of contractors with bad service experiences will continue to do business with their supplier – if their complaint is successfully resolved. As the research demonstrates the percentage goes up to 82% to 90% if the difficulty is resolved quickly, this company tries to provide customers with as many opportunities as possible to sound off about ordering or job site problems or concerns.
Homeowners and Construction Professionals Prefer Doing Business with Companies Whose Employees Have Excellent Customer Service Skills
The Small Business Administration (SBA) reports the early years of this new century – when customers blithely traded away high-quality service in exchange for price reductions or convenience – are history.
Instead, SBA notes customers are again demonstrating a willingness to pay more when customer service is an integral part of a company’s product or service offerings.
Satisfying – or exceeding – customer service demands has special implications for the ready-mix industry, with true service excellence providing a cost-effective way for a ready-mix company to stand apart from its competition.
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We’ll expand our discussion of adding value through service in next week’s post.