WITH ALL OUR FOCUS ON GOOD/BETTER/BEST PRACTICES
and their integration with the concept of holistic supply chains,
we sometimes put customer service on the mental back burner.
But without customer service as an integral component, what’s the
point of supply chain excellence?
It’s not simply about reducing or managing costs; that’s too easy
and too simplistic. Customer service is the reason that supply chains
exist: right thing, right place, right network, right time, right way,
right price, right attitude.
What customers need—and sometimes have the audacity to
expect—is driven by their product and order profiles (which can
change over time), their needs, their demands of the moment
(which often relate to their needs), and how they must deliver to
satisfy their own customers. It is, as we have
previously written, customer service that drives
how supply chains are built, determining such
things as distribution network structures, inventory holdings and deployment practices, transport modes and use, and sourcing and supplier
integration.
These fundamentals are true whether one
provides goods or services, and whether the
arena is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce. Those who
get all those rights right, will prosper. Those
who don’t, won’t. But ultimate demise may be a
while in coming.
THE LATEST CASE(S)
Your fearlessly adventurous reporters were not caught up in the
much-ballyhooed and overhyped overload at parcel carriers trying to
meet impossible demand peaks for Christmas. And, in truth, those
“failures” were not the consequence of deliberate actions to contain
costs or to pretend to have a customer service commitment when
the real wish was for the customer to go away quietly after paying.
But the spotlight has helped intensify our thinking about the
criticality of customer service, both genuine and ersatz, in business
success in the Age of the Supply Chain. And we have had our own
service contretemps in the recent past. FedEx and UPS are certainly
not bad actors in the customer service melodrama. And a few com-
BY ART VAN BODEGRAVEN AND
KENNETH B. ACKERMAN basictraining
They also serve who only stand
and wait – really?
panies have built staggering reputations and cult-like followings on nth-degree customer service.
They, in general, are succeeding wildly. We refrain
from naming them, lest we omit a deserving
candidate, but the industry verticals represented
include automotive, general retail, apparel, manufacturing, hospitality, specialty retail, communications, entertainment, and business services—and,
yes, supply chain management.
THE DARK SIDE
There, sadly, are too many no-service or not-quite-service providers lurking in the thickets of
competitive commerce. These
are the outfits that have a formal customer service function
because it is required, whether
by regulators, by license grantors, by competitors’ practices,
or by the demands of customer perception. Many of these
great pretenders try to get
by with slogans, outrageous
claims, charismatic spokes-models, and loads of advertising. But they do reveal core
corporate cultures when facing
(or avoiding) service stress.
Do they not realize that protected territories for
single provider services are a fading remnant of
the past? That unique products and processes lose
uniqueness or patent protection over time? That
there are competitors in all dimensions of products and services who can and will differentiate
based on technology, reliability, service, cost, quality, integration, whatever? But treating customers
like unworthies of somewhat diminished capacity
is not a strategically successful course for sustainable revenue and profit building. And too many
companies fail to respect their customers, whether
