Your customers talk candidly about products, services and expectations
By Barbara Bucci
Your customers are a lot like you. They need to make a living. They have deadlines to meet. No matter what service or product they buy, they need and expect to be heard by their service providers.
End-users discussed their concerns and the products and services they receive through distributors. Their observations can be applied to three categories: knowledge, service and business behavior.
Know Your Stuff
We all know how quickly technology is changing and how quickly clients are changing to adapt to it. The Business Forms Management Association (BFMA) offers an an-nual symposium with classes and seminars designed to teach end-users how to use new equipment and processes.
This year, end-users reported that not all of their companies are fully networked. In addition, they stated that not everyone in their organizations have PCs or access to the network. Most importantly, many reported that they still use a significant amount of paper.
Those statements point to two important facts. First, traditional business forms still comprise a large part of the distributor's business. Secondly, not all end-users have installed sophisticated systems or equipment in their offices.
When a South Carolina public utility decided to transfer all of its internal forms from a WordPerfect program to a sophisticated electronic forms package, the company never expected what it encountered.
After making initial inquiries to a software company, the team of forms designers was referred to three VARs. None of the VARs could answer the forms designers' questions.
"We'd ask questions and she'd never call back. We had questions about writing macros and getting some of the form fields to perform certain calculations. We had to keep asking the same questions and she had no answers. My list of questions just got larger," said one of the designers.
Although the designers were given one year to choose a program, and had decided on their software within the year, almost eight months elapsed before they felt forced to go direct.
"Of course, money was one part of the decision [to go direct]. But confidence was another. We were already burned," said the designer.
Whether you are selling software or consumables for computer systems, you need to be aware of how the product works and how it will be used. That means also knowing how the product should be stored and shipped in order to guarantee optimum performance.
An operations manager for the information processing department of a large Chicago bank experienced problems when ordering specialized computer tapes and toner.
"We needed initialized and climatized computer tapes. Our distributor didn't understand what that meant and sent us tapes that weren't stored in a climate-controlled environment. We'd have to reclimatize them for a couple of weeks before we could use them.
"We even provided education from our perspective, but the distributor didn't change his practices. Tapes were kept in the warehouse for long periods of time and would shrink or expand with warehouse conditions. We felt that we shouldn't be in the position to educate. Rather, the distributor should educate us," he said.
Although that incident occurred about six years ago, the Chicago manager noted that the problem still has not been fixed. "That particular distributor is maintained for our other office supplies, and still doesn't have the knowledge for climatization," he said.
It's Your Serve
Of course knowledge is an important part of the picture. But it's not the only part. Everyone wants good service too.
"I think that one of the perceptions of the distributor is that of being strictly bottom-line focused," said Joyce Gatonska, president of the BFMA.
"When you purchase a product directly from the manufacturer, you know the level of customer service and that the developer is there. So, the [distributor] needs to work that much harder," she said.
"Distributors need to focus on the fact that anybody can sell a product," claimed Gatonska. "It's like when you buy a copier. Anybody can sell you a box. It's all of the product's bells and whistles [that are especially important to the end-user]. And today's bells and whistles are to really understand the product, your customer's business, as well as the problems that he's trying to solve and how your product will help him to do that."
Essential to customer service is an organized order-taking system with follow up procedures. End-users are concerned when orders fall through the cracks or when their distributor doesn't follow up to make sure that service has been efficient and of the proper quality.
A purchasing officer at a San Francisco-area petroleum and chemical products company has experienced difficulty in receiving tag and permit orders on time.
"The broker has caused problems in the past because of his own lack of organizational and customer service skills," she said. "We found that we had to do all the follow up work. When orders didn't appear on time, we would have to call to check on them. He did not have a system to check on the status of orders with his manufacturer or think it important enough that even minor delays in delivery should be reported to us.
"Once he placed our orders with the manufacturer, it appeared that he just forgot about them. In other instances, he would return our calls by car phone and not write anything down, and we would have to repeat the information to him again when he got back to his office. We formally spoke to him about his performance."
- People:
- Barbara Bucci