We spend a lot of time focusing on customer service after the sale, highlighting training and aftermarket and dealing with customer service reps, but it’s important to remember that one of the biggest pieces in the customer service puzzle is your sales team.

Your sales team sets the tone with the customer for the rest of the organization to follow. A bad experience with a salesperson can keep a prospect from turning into a customer, or worse, jeopardize the relationship with them once they are a customer. A good experience with a salesperson can keep a customer from leaving when they have trouble with the service side of your organization as well. After the sale, salespeople can be more like the oil and grease that keeps the car tuned up and running great with periodic maintenance.

So when it comes to customers leaving, your sales team is your first line of defense. I found a good post over at BusinessBrief.com on The Top 8 Reasons Customer Leave and though it’s a little harsh towards sales, I think there are some good points, including:

• Customers leave when they feel like they only get invoices from your company
• Customers leave when they feel like they’re too small to get your interest
• Customers leave when they feel like they don’t hear from a sales rep after the sale is closed
• Customers leave when they feel like you spend too much time and attention on prospects

Some of the points are hard to contend with as a salesperson – what’s the ideal balance between working on new business (prospects) and nurturing your existing business (customers)? There’s no single right answer, but it’s something on your customers’ minds and it’s something for your sales team to keep in mind as they work with your prospects and customers.

It’s also important to note a lot of these post-sale points are “feel” points – that is the customer perceives it to be the case, even if the salesperson doesn’t. Before the sale, the customer was in constant interaction with a responsive salesperson in a much more structured process. The customer would ask for a video, a data sheet, a quote or anything else and they got it.

After the sale, there usually isn’t a structure or process in place, so the customer may feel more neglected and less nurtured, relative to their pre-sale treatment. The salesperson will still respond quickly to requests from the customer, but there is much less of this after the sale, in fact, a lot of salespeople will say if they don’t hear from the customer after the sale it’s because everything is running smoothly.

So it’s important for your sales team to think about any kind of structure or process they can put in place post-sale to keep in good spirits with the customer. Things like a “60 day rule” that ensures every customer gets a communication every 60 days is one idea we use within several of our divisions.

Are there things your organization does particularly well as a post-sale process? Give it some thought and I’m sure you can find a few things you can do without adding too much burden to your organization.

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One of Pro Mach’s divisions uses a written exam as part of its new machine training program, and I wondered how machine operators reacted when faced with taking a written test. After reviewing a sample exam for a Wexxar/BEL case former, I became even more curious about operator reaction. The nine page exam, complete with schematics, looked like it came right out of a technical college course. What happened to operators if they failed?

Peter Zepf, director of service and HR, Wexxar/BEL, started the written exam process at this Pro Mach division. Zeph said the exams are assessment tools that enable the instructor to determine how well each person in the training session understood the overall process and key parameters of operating the machine, not the pass/fail tests I imagined. Zepf added that Wexxar/BEL PMMI certified trainers review every incorrect answer with the test taker and ask the person to explain the process used to arrive at the response. The trainer helps the operator grasp the internal logic of the machine and the thought processes for arriving at the correct interpretation and answer. Trainers do that with every person in the group.

Doesn’t that take a lot of time? “A lot less time than a service call,” Zepf says. He said that most operators don’t mind the written exam. In fact, after completing the course and receiving their certificates most graduates feel a sense of pride in their mastery of a state-of-the-art packaging machine.

Some end users report consistently fast changeover, while others say machine uptime is high and service calls are low compared to packaging machines supplied by companies that offer less stringent training. One end user submitted the Wexxar/BEL training materials to a State agency and the cost of the training was reimbursed from a workers’ improvement fund. Zepf said that in some instances end users retain the course materials and exam and train new operators themselves.

Here’s the question: Are you satisfied with the overall quality of training provided by machine builders? Vote yes or no. I welcome your comments.

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Does one or more of the following statements apply to your operations?

• We don’t have the time or budget for extensive training on new equipment
• We have no formal training process when new operators or maintenance personnel come to the line
• We don’t have the budget to pay for service contracts with equipment suppliers
• We often do not service our equipment at OEM recommended intervals
• When we can, we buy non-OEM replacement parts because they are cheaper
• Our maintenance team simply does not have the bandwidth to maintain production lines the way we feel they need to be maintained

I hope that none of these statements apply to your operations. I suspect, however, that the maintenance conditions described in the statements are not aberrations, but common problems within the industry.

The statements above come down to time, budget, and/or personnel. Maintenance personnel today may feel more like firefighters than highly trained technicians. Available time to work on problems shrinks while the growing complexity of electro-mechanical machines and the number of machines in use increase, leaving not enough hours in a day for small maintenance teams to stay on top of preventive maintenance. Even before the economic downturn, maintenance budgets and headcount were being squeezed. The downturn simply accelerated the trend of cutting staff and budgets.

Until the operations team can put together a compelling fact-based case for senior management’s consideration, the situation will likely become worse. One suggestion would be to work with a select group of suppliers on preventative maintenance and training. Collect data on downtime, throughput, scrap, quality, and overall maintenance costs on those machines. Have a set of control machines that do not receive the extra attention and after six or eight months compare the difference between the two groups. Prepare a cost/benefit analysis and take your case to management.

If service and support professionals want to see positive change in order to more fully contribute to the success of the organization – achieve outstanding uptime, ensure fast changeover, lower waste, work toward highest possible throughout, and stop the bloodletting in budgets and personnel – they must become fact-based service and support champions.

Here’s the question: Do you have the data that indicates that preventive maintenance pays for itself? Vote yes or no. I welcome your comments.

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You really should strive to be the Zappos of your industry. Seriously. Ever heard of Zappos? If not you should know that they’re an online shoe and clothing company. How is that relevant to the packaging industry or any industry that’s not online shoes and clothing?

Simple – Zappos understands that their business is not about shoes and clothing. If you’ve heard about them you probably know of their legendary customer service. But you know the most important thing at Zappos? You’d think it’s customer service. It’s not.

Culture is the most important thing. WITHOUT the right culture you don’t create a legendary customer service experience. WITH the right culture the service experience and all the other great stuff will naturally happen. If the culture is right you don’t need all the bureaucracy and process. You can’t game plan for every possible scenario. The right culture makes sure that when the unthinkable happens it’s dealt with the right way.

Easier said than done though, right? It’s actually fairly simple. Figure out what your core values are. What they really are. If it’s teamwork, positive attitude, simpler engineering designs, more complex engineering designs, whatever makes up your core set of values, that’s what you hire for. Figure out ways to make sure you and the person you are hiring see eye-to-eye on those points. And if you do hire someone and realize those core values aren’t there that’s what you fire for.

Hiring for skill set only can occasionally work, but only if they fit the culture. Hiring people who fit the culture keeps everyone wanting to come to work in the morning.

To be sure, having the right culture in place isn’t the most cost-effective thing. Zappos notoriously offers employees who go through training $2,000 to quit at the end of their orientation. Right there. On the spot. Take the cash and leave. Cost-effective? No. But it’s powerful stuff that makes the people who stay positive they’re making the right choice. We’ve all taken jobs we knew weren’t a good fit. Zappos works hard to make sure that never happens.

On the cost front as well Zappos recently had an issue with one of their web sites where pricing went awry for about 6 hours and all items were sold for no more than $49.95, even items that normally went for much more than that. Zappos took the blame, admitting the mistake was their fault and then, after fixing the problem, decided to honor all the purchases that took place. They took a loss of $1.6 million in those 6 hours because of the mistake. Deciding not to void the sales was probably not a hard decision either, because their culture says you do the right thing. It’s a radical example, for sure, but it speaks to the culture they have in place.

If you want to better understand what Zappos preaches about culture, carve out 20 minutes of your day to watch this video of Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO, as he explains why he does what he does. It will open your eyes:

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It’s one thing to see a packaging machine on a trade show floor and quite another to visit the plant where the machine was designed and built. At a trade show you experience the machine. Within the manufacturing plant, you gain first hand knowledge of the spirit that went into the design and manufacture of that machine.

Telling details emerge on facility tours. Clean work areas and well maintained and organized hand tools indicate a craftsmanship mentality. Tour guides who highlight the quality of the materials used in the machines, low turnover of the manufacturing staff, and the longevity of the company’s machines indicate what’s important to them – the quality of the product. When the tour guide introduces technicians, says hello to staffers, or stops to ask a question about a particular machine, you know that the guide is no stranger to the shop floor.

A tour will show how the plant evolved over time and whether sound decisions were made in organizing workflow given the constraints of the physical layout. Signs of growth in the manufacturing area are a plus. A discussion of the design tools available to the design team and interaction with the design staff during the tour indicate an engineering focused company.

The plant tour and meeting the people behind the machine provides customers the opportunity to more completely understand the origin of the machine and the ability to project its ultimate performance. Companies that build long-lasting packaging machines promote an engineering culture and take pride in their quality products. These same high standards can be found in the service and support offered by the machine manufacturer.

When you acquire a packaging machine you acquire the manufacturer as a long-term partner. Before entering into that relationship, visit the place where the machine will be built. Experience for yourself the culture behind the machine.

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We’re starting a new segment here at ProCustomer.com where we’ll occasionally spotlight Pro Mach employees who have gone above and beyond in providing customer service and have been praised by a customer. For each spotlight we’ll do a quick Q&A format with 5 questions on customer service.

For our first “5 Questions” segment we’re featuring Beau Moreau, Lead Engineer at Allpax Products down in Covington, LA. Beau received some terrific praise from a pet food company Allpax recently did some work with:

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for the audit performed by Beau Moreau. It was very enlightening as I expected it would be. Beau is an extremely talented individual who displayed top notch professionalism during his visit. It was a pleasure working with him and he certainly is an employee Allpax can be proud of.

- Director of Operations
Major Pet Food Manufacturer

With that said, here’s 5 Questions with Beau Moreau:

1) Your personal philosophy of customer service in 5 words or less:
Solid support equals recurring business.

2) What can a customer do to give you the best chance to shine?
Set clear expectations. Prepare an agenda or list of items for any in-plant service work and distribute the list both to us (the vendor) and internally to their plant.

3) What’s the most “above and beyond” you feel like you’ve gone for a customer?
I frequently provide customers with 3D CAD work and preliminary engineering information to demonstrate an idea or plan to provide work. I find this visualization of conceptual work provides a better understanding between the customers and myself.

4) What new technologies are having a major impact on service and support?
Using Solidworks as the primary CAD platform for new engineering work. This has increased the fidelity of our engineering work and also allows us to provide drawings and 3D models to our potential customers. This real world depiction of 3D objects is much easier to understand than 2D line drawings.

5) What’s the biggest obstacle customers face for achieving maximum machine or line uptime?
Preventative maintenance.

Many thanks to Beau Moreau for taking time to answer these questions and congratulations to him on wowing our customers.

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As we all know, word-of-mouth (or a referral) is one of the best measures of success for any company. If a customer is willing to tell other people about your company in a positive manner then odds are you’ve got a satisfied customer. The more satisfied customers you have the more potential customers will seek you out without you having to seek them out.

However, measuring word-of-mouth is difficult. That’s where Net Promoter Score (NPS) comes in. It’s meant to help measure customer loyalty and predict customer retention. While not truly measuring how much new business you get from referrals, it does the next best thing – it measures your customers willingness to give referrals.

The wonderful thing about Net Promoter Score is the simplicity of  the whole thing. To get the data to calculate your NPS you ask your customers one simple question: “How likely is it (on a scale of 0 to 10) that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” That’s it. One question. It’s a beautiful thing. Then to get your NPS you simply take the percentage of promoters (those who answered 9 or 10) and subtract the percentage of detractors (those who answered 4 or lower). See this graphic for a full explanation:

(Graphic credit: Joshua Porter and his Metrics-Driven Design Presentation)

As for the mechanics of the survey, we find that sending out an email with a brief explanation and a link to take the survey online works well. We recommend using radio buttons for the 0 to 10 scale as it’s a way to encourage the user to click on something. Other form options could introduce bias because of a default value or could allow people to choose more than one answer, all of which could undermine your results. We also recommend adding one more question after the NPS question asking your customers something like “What can we do to improve?” and leave them an open text area to type in any comments or suggestions. Expect a response rate of about 10% to 20%, depending on the quality of your customer list.

Large consumer companies that truly focus on customer service (like Amazon) will have a NPS around 80%. It’s said that most average companies have a rating of 5% to 10%.

For those of you who’ve done surveys before you know that asking as few questions as possible helps to encourage people to actually answer the survey. When you can send an email asking someone to take your survey and honestly tell them it should take only about one minute of their time, your response rates will go up. Guaranteed.

The other great thing about Net Promoter Score is it’s a very simple way to stay in touch with your customers. It helps pull the complexity out of the customer satisfaction measurement process and shows your customers that you are paying attention and continually working to improve your business and make them happier.

Getting your first NPS rating is the toughest, because you need to develop a very clean mailing list, find survey software to use, etc. But what getting the first one completed does is set the benchmark for where you are with your customers. If you notice that your NPS is dropping over the next few surveys, you’ll know something is possibly wrong with your customer experience and you can try to figure out what’s going on.

To improve your NPS focus on customer touch points that are likely to have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction. A lot of times you may realize these touch points are the “low hanging fruit” anyway that can turn your good company into a great one. Also focus on any comments you get on your other survey question asking how you can improve and then try to do those things before your next survey goes out.

Net Promoter Score is a good and fairly easy way to measure customer satisfaction. We completed our first NPS survey for one of our Pro Mach divisions a few months ago and got a Net Promoter Score of 66.7% – good, but we’ve got room to improve.

We’d love to hear your comments about your customer satisfaction measurement process, your experience with NPS and anything else.

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A number of the equipment manufacturer service managers I speak with are frustrated by the fact they only talk with customers when they experience a problem.

These managers think that machine operators don’t receive enough initial or ongoing training to maintain proper adjustments that keep the machine in spec. They say that end users do not service the machine at recommended intervals which leads to downtime. Some customers, they say, have a tendency to buy cheap replacement parts that not only break more quickly than OEM components, but also cause additional machine wear. Service managers decry the fact that so many customers pass up the opportunity to keep the machines well maintained through preventive maintenance service contracts.

During the sales process

Sales personnel don’t like talking about service because it implies the machine they sell isn’t high quality. Many customers don’t want to hear about service contracts because of the extra cost. Equipment company service managers, uninvolved during the sales process, don’t have a chance to weigh in. Frankly, most may not have the data to back up the cost/benefit ratio of ongoing training and preventative maintenance service contracts.

I suggest that service managers and equipment sales personnel become preventative maintenance contract champions and proclaim at every opportunity the value of those contracts. This advocacy must be fact based in order to demonstrate the positive impacts proper maintenance and training can have on productivity and costs. That means thorough data collection and analysis. Accurate cost/benefit ratios must be integrated into this analysis.

Sales people, customers, and service personnel should come together at the beginning of the sales process in order to chart a course toward lowest-total-cost of ownership and highest uptime and product quality. Without this cooperation, service managers will talk with customers only when they have a problem.

Here’s the question: Do service and sales personnel adequately explain the value of preventative maintenance service contracts?

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When we embarked on creating ProCustomer, we had a lot of learning to do to get up to speed on truly understanding and documenting what it takes to offer superior customer service. We had a general idea that we were offering great customer service, but we never really deconstructed it to understand how we did it. Along the way we made some key findings in our “discovery phase” we thought would be worthwhile to share with you.

The Most Important Lesson

Starting right from the beginning we kept rediscovering something we intellectually knew but that really didn’t sink in fully until we really thought long and hard about it:

• WE control customer service

As a company, we control it. There’s not a lot you can say you control as a company. The economy is out of your control, the weather is out of your control, what your competitors do is out of your control, your vendors getting you the correct parts is out of your control, your customers paying you on time is out of your control, foreign exchange rates are out of your control, etc. But you own your customer service experience and have all the power to make it great. That’s really powerful stuff.

Defining Superior Customer Service

Next, we needed to really hone in on what we wanted to offer. We knew we wanted to offer superior customer service, but what did that really mean? So we attempted to define it in the simplest of terms:

• Superior Customer Service – A positive experience for customers that is consistently delivered so well they have no reason to switch to a competitor

At the end of the day this is what we were striving for – to create great customer service experiences with our customers every time we interacted with them that made it hard for them to consider another company. That should be the goal of every business.

Customer Service Facts

Next we found a few key facts that really made it painfully obvious why we needed to focus on customer service:

• 65% of customer defections are controllable
• 45% of customer defections are service related

These statistics were really powerful. Nearly half of customer defections are due to service, something we control! We started to realize that the customer experience had be our top priority and reflected in our work processes, structure and systems. Everything we do had to be focused on making the customer experience great.

3 Groups of Customers

Next we found some information on classifying customers that really stuck with us. Essentially customers can fall into one of three categories:

• Advocates
• Apathetics
• Assassins

Our goal, as a company, is to have as many advocates as possible. Most customers fall into the Apathetics group where they’re satisfied, but not delighted. Assassins can bring us down and will tell other people about it. If we have a customer that’s an Assassin then we’ve probably given them several bad customer service experiences. Thinking about your individual customers and trying to identify which group they fall into is an eye-opening exercise.

The Customer Satisfaction Curve

The next thing that really opened our eyes was understanding the customer satisfaction curve – shown below. Understanding that in between the extreme cases of Assassins (on the lower left) and Advocates (on the upper right) were over 90% of our customers (Apathetics) was pretty powerful, as was the realization that it takes A LOT to move a customer from an Apathetic to an Advocate:

(Source: Corporate Executive Board, Climbing the Service Curve, 2003)

Creating Superior Customer Service

Now the last step was creating superior customer service. While our ProCustomer Attributes are well-documented, we didn’t start with those and instead had to focus on high-level points first before we could really get down to the tactical level. With that understanding here’s what we identified as the critical points to deliver a truly superior customer service:

• It had to be unique to our core strengths
• It had to have complete organizational support and active participation
• It had to revolve around profitable product and service offerings
• It had to be consistent – communication, behaviors, products and service
• It had to emphasize continual relationship building – both internal and external
• It had to begin with an understanding of both our customers’ and our own business’ requirements for success
• It had to focus on constantly communicating those requirements to both our team and our customers

So that’s how we got started on ProCustomer. There were a lot of other steps in the process and a lot that came after this, but these were our early lessons that still ring true. We hope you enjoyed this peek into our discovery process.

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I am a firm believer in the role of certification to help people take their experience to an industry recognized level of expertise. I’ve found that those who earn certification have a profound feeling of accomplishment and conduct themselves with a noticeably higher level of professionalism.

If a person is going to train others on the use of equipment, earning a training certification is especially important. The reason is that knowledge of a technical subject is no guarantee that a person can effectively teach a diverse group of adult learners about that subject. In fact, some of the most technically astute people I know should be kept as far away from a classroom as possible. They are simply poor communicators.

The PMMI trainer certification helps ensure that an individual knows how to create an environment conducive to learning as well as teach others rather than merely presenting them with information. Here are some of the skills that a candidate must master to become a PMMI certified trainer:

• Assess training needs (and pre-training needs) and address them with customers
• Facilitate the learning experience by using a variety of training techniques
• Provide user-friendly aids: checklists, performance checks, and troubleshooting guides
• Customize a training plan specifically to meet the needs of adult learners
• Work through cultural and generational differences
• Identify the training/learning “gaps”
• Measure performance goals
• Evaluate the training return on investment
• Develop a realistic follow-up and ongoing training plans

Two of these bullets stand out for me: Customize a training plan specifically to meet the needs of adult learners; Work through cultural and generational differences. Everyone learns in slightly different ways and if the trainer doesn’t have a clue about how to tailor the information or discern who thrives by reading, listening, viewing, or hands-on teaching methods then the effort can’t be as effective as it might be. One size does not fit all.

No one wants a poor training experience, not management, not line personnel. Poorly trained workers can’t maintain optimum uptime and overall equipment effectiveness, not to mention ensure that quality standards are met, minimize waste, and know how to safely operate equipment.

Here’s the question: Do you prefer that OEMs have their trainers certified to the PMMI standard? Vote yes or no. I welcome your comments.

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