Stay ahead of customer demand
Paper or plastic?
It was a question Schmid and his team had to ask themselves about how consumers preferred to have their dairy products contained.
The products used to be in paper cartons, but consumer demands changed.
“It’s something that consumers wanted,” he says. “We could see that by watching what was selling in convenient stores and in the market, and [we] figured, ‘How can we do that to the dairy industry? How could we do that ourselves?’”
Customer needs can quickly change.
“They said one thing was important in the past, and suddenly, it’s not so important,” he says. “You are just paying attention to customers and seeing and listening to them on what is the driving force. It’s gone from taking cost out to providing more service and then providing less service to lower the price again, but then you get back to wanting more. The definition of service keeps changing, too.”
To try to stay ahead of customer demands, Schmid tries to get out of the office and actually talk to the customers. Because that isn’t possible all the time, he depends on his employees and his team to sometimes get that information in their discussions with customers. Though the company doesn’t have formal interviews, they spend time talking to them about what they want.
“It’s their buying decision — learning from them what they like or don’t like,” he says “Sometimes, you can get out of them why you didn’t get the business or you did. If you didn’t, what did they like about somebody else’s program better than what you have?”
It’s that type of information that will point you in the right direction on how to better your company.
“A lot of it is looking at what’s going on in the environment around us and understanding that,” he says. “How we can compete well with the changing competition and customer and supplier and with the changes in all those different things and select one where we can really be the best at it? That takes a lot of input and hard work that we all have to work on.”
How to reach: Smith Dairy Products Co., (330) 683-8710 or www.smithdairy.com