24 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK Laurence Claus Laurence Claus is the President of NNi Training and Consulting, Inc. He has 25 years of experience with a medium sized automotive fastener manufacturer, holding positions including Vice President of Engineering, General Manager, Director of Quality, Director of New Business Development and Applications Engineer. In 2012 he formed NNi offering technical and business training courses as well as technical consulting, expert witness and consultation work. He can be reached at 847-867-7363 or by email: Lclaus@NNiTraining.com. You can learn more about NNi at www.NNiTraining.com. THREE THINGS THAT DISTRIBUTORS MUST DO WELL - PART 1 Not long ago I was reading a business management book. Amongst all of the things that the author was suggesting, he had a chapter on the twenty things that you should not be doing. It was an interesting concept and one very reminiscent of my training in competitive strategy, where one learns that strategy is as much about the things you say no to as it is the things you choose to do. Anyway, this idea struck a chord and led me to set about putting together this three part series on three things that distributors must resist the urge to ignore, and, thus cannot do poorly. Although I am sure that there are a large number of topics we could place in this category, for this series we will focus on three big ones; Customer Service, Quality, and Training. Doing the first two poorly is a sure equation to lose reputation and customers, while ignoring the third places you at risk of becoming outdated and irrelevant to customers. I often teach on the subject of quality and will commonly engage participants in a discussion about what constitutes quality and why it is so important. Invariably the dialog boils down to two consequences of poor quality, lost profits and lost reputation. I often make the point that although lost profits are painful to experience, they have every possibility of only being short term. Loss of reputation, however, can, and often does, have long-lasting and permanent consequences. It is likely something programmed into the human psyche, but when we feel that we have been wronged or disabused, CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLE we often do two things, 1. Vote with our feet by dropping the supplier or service provider, and, 2. Get memories like elephants that condition us to never go back to that supplier again. As the old adage goes, “Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me twice, shame on me.” Perhaps the only other activity next to quality that is so easy to entrap an organization and damage their reputation is providing poor customer service. In my experience it seems that the only organizations that can truly get away with abysmal customer service and not go out of business are the undertaker and the IRS because as the old saying goes, we can escape everything except dying and paying taxes. Ironically, providing good, actually exceptional, customer service isn’t that hard, but it must come from within the organization’s culture. In other words, no amount of training or desire is going to all of a sudden make an organization excel at customer service. No, it must be a value that the entire organization, starting at the top, must possess. There are many aspects and individual characteristics that can be utilized to gage whether an organization has good customer service or not. The remaining portion of this article is going to explore five of them. Although every organization is going to have its own unique situation which will define the customer service activities and values that it needs, these five are relatively universal and can be applied to pretty much any specific situation. CONTINUED ON PAGE 102
68 THE DISTRIBUTOR’S LINK Earnest
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