Look beyond statistics
Congdon is surrounded by customers every day. It’s not just the ones who tour headquarters daily; the office walls are covered with thousands of customers’ before and after pictures.
“You cannot get away from the customer in our company,” he says. “I am shocked when I go to other companies that sell direct like we do and I realize that there is no sense of the customer inside those offices.”
If you make fan belts, you’re probably not going to have photos of people who love your product plastering your office. But to keep the focus on customers, you can make heroes of people who create a positive experience for them.
You’ll only recognize who’s doing that if you have ways to measure it. That starts with the expectations you set in training, but you won’t always know initially if those will have tangible, measurable effects.
“Do I try to make improvements without knowing how I’m going to measure them but because I know it’s better for the customer? Yes,” Congdon says. “Does it usually turn out that I’ve got something measurable that happens as a result of hitting that mark? Yes.”
For example, Congdon realized shipping products on time — within five to seven business days — wasn’t good enough. Customers expected the low end of the range, and they’d start calling on day four to ask where their product was. They’d whittled down the official deadline.
So Congdon set the internal deadline on day five to meet that expectation and realized it reduced canceled orders by 50 percent, returns by 40 percent and “where’s-my-order” calls by 80 percent.
Although he didn’t set out to, he can monitor when shipments go out as well as what effect that has on other statistics.
Those statistics can also contribute to your broader understanding of whether your expectations are resonating with employees.
“Certainly, it pays off in the reactions of your customers and the number of complaints that you get or the number of positive letters that you get,” he says.
Plus, the unresolved complaints go straight to the top for Congdon and Daikeler to handle.
“I’ve had people that were a little frustrated after they say that 99 percent of the products went out in 24 hours and then I respond with, ‘Well, what happened with the 1 percent?’” Congdon says. “(That) sounds great, but not if you’re one of the customers that fell into the (1) percent. You can look at statistics generally and go, ‘Wow, that looks like an A+,’ … but always think about individuals rather than the stats. We feel that 1 percent because those are the complaints that come to us.”
While the company has gotten good at dealing with those, it doesn’t have as many because complaints have dwindled. Instead, Congdon and his team are getting a lot of unsolicited praise, as more than half of their sales are now sparked through word-of-mouth recommendations from other customers.
“My job is making sure that we don’t get in the way of that and that our operations literally remove any barrier to that word-of-mouth transaction occurring,” Congdon says. “What we do is we try to give our customers all the tools possible … and let our customers be our best spokespeople and our best salespeople.”
HOW TO REACH: Product Partners LLC, (800) 714-7254 or www.beachbody.com
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