Study customer satisfaction to
gauge your performance levels.
Performance is a hard thing to
measure. Sometimes customers will tell you, sometimes they won’t, whether
they’re happy with how you’ve
served them or not.
Sometimes, we as leaders, all
we’re looking at are the numbers, the dollar numbers.
That’s fine. You’ve got to do
that, but you’ve also got to find
other ways of measuring your
performance and customer
satisfaction.
We’ve hired a company that
for every deal that we sell, this
company contacts the customer and does a phone interview with the customer and
asks a series of questions
we’ve designated with them.
Then they give us a report on
that. Let us know how we
have done with that customer,
whether we met their needs,
whether they’re satisfied with
what we provided them with.
We separate (the data) by
customer and by the salespeople that are responsible for
those various different customers. It’s one of the tools we
use to evaluate the salespeople
and not just the salespeople
but also parts and services.
It flows through the whole organization. It’s certainly another measure of performance.
Find a balance between providing
good customer service and the
cost of doing so. You have to
look at each situation as it
comes up and figure out a
solution to solve your customers’ problems.
We look at each situation as
a stand-alone situation and try
to deal with it according to
what best serves the customer.
Sometimes it means we’ve got
to send one of our guys out to
their facility to solve it there.
Sometimes it might be the
solution is best by sending a
driver out and picking up the
bus and bringing it back to our
facility to solve a problem.
There’s always going to be a
balance between providing
great customer service and the cost of providing that service.
It’s difficult to really measure,
in a lot of cases, whether or
not the customer service that
you provide, whether there’s
payback for it.
A lot of times you don’t see a
direct additional payback. But
through my many years of
experience, I have learned
there is a payback. It may be a
couple years down the road,
but customers remember great
service, and they will reward
you eventually.
I don’t know if you can really
put an equation to the balance.
You’ve just got to know that
customers do appreciate great
service, and they’ll reward it in
the future with giving you
additional business.
HOW TO REACH: Central States Bus Sales Inc., (636) 343-6050 or www.centralstatesbus.com
