Packing up and moving is
stressful for anyone, but
Tom Marshall aims to make it less so by training his
220 employees in the art of
customer service.
To improve customer satisfaction, the chairman and CEO
of Andrews Moving and
Storage measures both the
quantity and the quality of his
employees’ work, which develops a healthy competition
among the staff.
“Everybody likes to be recognized for doing a job well,”
Marshall says. “This gives us a
great platform to do just that.
[And] everybody gets a chance
to be recognized or retrained
— the flip side to that.”
Marshall’s commitment to
service helped the 100-year-old
moving company reach 2007
revenue of $30 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Marshall about how evaluating
employee performance is like
rebalancing your investments
and why you shouldn’t just
give up on an underperformer.
Q. How do you measure
employee performance?
We try to find two or three
measurements that will affect
almost every function that
somebody could be employed
with here. They’re reviewed
either monthly or quarterly,
depending on the measurement matrix.
For example, you may be
measuring someone’s volume
of service. They may be handling a lot of account contacts
in our office. We try to balance
that so that each of our counselors has a fair workload.
That’s a measurement that is
pretty easy to come by.
We also do extensive surveying of our customers, both in
written form and by phone follow-up by a third party, to
determine their level of satisfaction with our service. So we
can measure that quantifiably.
There is always the danger
of if you’re measuring just
speed, that you’re sacrificing
service. We try to balance
those measurements so that
somebody who’s handling high
volume also has to recognize
the quality service matrix
we’re measuring to balance
their performance.
Q. How do you measure quality of service?
We want our customers
to get us information
back. We work hard and
spend a lot of money to
get that feedback.
You might say it’s like
rebalancing an investment account. You want
to make sure you’re not
focused only on one segment of that performance.
We’re such a service-oriented, hands-on kind
of a business. I don’t
want to say that if we
were in manufacturing,
it would be easier, but we’ve
got crews all over the country
responsible for shipments all
over the world.
There are a lot of deviations
in what the service norm
might be based on the circumstances our customer has
found themselves in.
In our household division,
there is a form that we mail
to customers. It involves over
50 questions based on service
they received. We always feel
gratified just that they return it.
Even at that, our return ratio is a little south of 30 percent.
We don’t think that’s enough
of a sampling, so we use a
phone follow-up, with a goal
of trying to reach 70 percent
response. That’s a more stable
platform to measure from.
That’s one benchmark. There
is a lot of detail involved. You
measure so many different
aspects. The trick is — and anybody who is in customer service
knows this — is when there is a
service issue, it’s generally not
the first cause that you’re identifying as the real cause.
You’ve got to drill down to
find the real cause — to find out
what really needs to rectified or adjusted. It’s not just, ‘The truck
was late,’ but why did it happen? You have to back down
until you get to the real reason.
It might be a software issue.
