Adjust to meet customer needs
Once he knows what customers are really looking for and thinking, then O’Dell makes changes to better meet their needs and expectations.
For example, in the situation of Saia’s Northwest expansion, the feedback caused him to re-evaluate his coverage area because, for some customers, it was important for him to go into the remote areas and not give that freight away to another company.
“Sometimes you have to accept that they’re a specialist and maybe they want to be the one that goes up the mountain and delivers that freight. There are certain markets that there are only a handful of smaller players that go up there, but you also have to look at it and say, ‘Well, they go there, does Con-way go there direct? Does FedEx go there direct?’
“You have to look at the marketplace itself and see if you’re putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage by not providing that particular service.”
But you also have to be careful in listening to clients.
“Sometimes the handful of customers may lead you in the wrong direction, too,” he says. “You have to go through a validation.”
For example, sometimes customers may tell him that they don’t care if it’s not Saia going up the mountain to make that tough delivery, and everything is rosy until something goes wrong.
“It all sounds good that it doesn’t really matter, but part of your product offering and your service is really exception management and problem resolution, and when there’s a handoff, you don’t really control it anymore,” O’Dell says. “You don’t have the access to the same type of information to handle a customer’s inquiry or question. When people tell you something, you have to validate it through your experience or some other method.”
That’s where the surveys and focus groups can come into play again. Typically, once a year, O&#
x2019;Dell polls salespeople to see what they can do better and get that kind of feedback.
“Sometimes when you look at rolling out a new product or pricing offering, we’ll pull a group of people together from operations and sales that have different experiences and backgrounds or things from different companies and run it by that group to see what kind of feedback they have or if they have experience from a different company to say what they think the customers will feel about it,” he says.
Sometimes you have to change regardless of whether you want to or not, but O’Dell says to look at it as an opportunity.
For example, one of his major customers, Wal-Mart, instituted a new policy: Before, Saia was able to deliver things early and Wal-Mart would store it, but now, everyone gets a window — if it arrives early or late, then the carrier would get fined. He now has to hold those shipments for longer periods of time.
“Sometimes you get an event that will impact a large portion of your customers and can enhance your product offering, and then you can take that and go offer it to others,” he says. “When you see things like that, it’s how you adapt to that. We may not necessarily get paid more for doing that, but we can get more business and, over time, you may get paid more. … Things like that, if you’re monitoring what’s going on in the marketplace and how you need to adapt to that, can provide some opportunities.”
