Make it Easy to Do Business with Your Company
By: Dave Clossey / T.J. Tedesco
For: The Binding Edge
Published: Spring, 2002

Have you ever asked customers to rate the level of service your company provides? If this were done on a scale from 1 to 10, what do you think the average would be? Somewhere around an eight or nine, right? If it fell any lower than that, you’d likely be scratching your head, wondering where the cracks in your customer service are.

If customers aren’t constantly calling to complain, is there anything wrong? You don’t know. Dozens of little things can go unnoticed, and will hamper your company’s sales and service efforts. Everything from slow turnaround times for quotes to an unfriendly voice on the phone can negatively impact the image your company projects to current and potential customers. When added together, these forgotten or neglected details may frighten away potential customers by giving them the sense that it isn’t very easy to do business with your company. Even if you don’t think there’s a problem, take a look at your “ease of doing business” system!

There are myriad points of contact between your company and your customers. By streamlining those communications and creating a clearly defined flow of customer responsibility, you make it much easier for the right information to quickly get into the right hands. Here are a few points to consider to help you make sure your current and potential customers are getting the best your company has to offer.

Create a reliable and efficient system
When a potential customer makes the decision to do business with your company, there are generally two characteristics they want to see: reliability and efficiency. A good system for internal communication between all departments will create the “behind the scenes” backbone necessary to service your customers seamlessly and avoid confusion and delays. After all, the last thing you want to hear from a customer is “Who am I supposed to deal with at your company?”

However, the very people responsible for bringing work into your company sometimes have a hand in driving it away. Missed sales opportunities can often be traced to unorganized communication between sales, estimating, customer service, and even production and fulfillment departments. Where you see a “sales and customer service team,” potential customers may see a “sales prevention department.”

A breakdown in communication can lead to a great deal of mishandled information. Here’s a hypothetical situation that shows where that breakdown can start. Let’s say a customer has requested a quote for 10,000 Wire-O books with black wire. Your sales representative has relayed the pertinent information to the estimating department, which prepares the quote and sends it out. The customer likes the quote and gives your company the job. At that point, the job information is passed to your customer service department.

Two days later, the customer calls back to change the details a bit. Instead of the black wire, they want to use a PMS-matched wire color. The sales representative fields the call, and takes note of the change. He tells the customer he will get back to them with an updated price and date the job will be completed, since the PMS wire will need to be ordered.

Just how quickly the sales representative gets back to the customer is a direct result of how well your company’s “ease of doing business” system functions. Let’s say the printed forms have already arrived on your loading dock. The handling of that job should now be the responsibility of your customer service department. But the sales rep fielded the call, so he gives the update to the estimating department so a new quote can be drawn up.

Here’s where the handling of this information can break down in the absence of a reliable system. At this point, there are more questions than answers: How quickly are your customer service department and plant manager informed of the changes? In the event the sales rep is out of the office and unable to be reached, does the customer service department have the authority to manage the account and make changes in a pinch?

This example may not represent exactly how these various functions are organized in your shop; you may not have these departments at all. But people in your company perform these same functions, and the communication between them needs to be seamless if the great service you tout to your customers really exists.

Your company wouldn’t survive long if there wasn’t a system in place between the various departments to handle almost every “what-if” scenario. But the efficiency and reliability of that system is what makes the difference between “customer service” and “sales prevention”.

Give your customers peace of mind!
Whatever system you have in place for the handling of customer information, there should be just one goal: to give your customers peace of mind by making your company as easy as possible to do business with. If nobody knows where to go for information, or who to give it to, it will be very hard for anyone to take meaningful action. If there isn’t a clearly defined chain of command as a job moves from “pending” to “in-house,” then the customer doesn’t know who they should be looking to for answers. If the customer doesn’t feel comfortable with the process, they aren’t going to continue doing business with you.

In such a competitive economic climate as ours, finishing companies need to retain as much business as possible. Though simply slashing prices may help get customers in the door, it won’t do a thing by itself to keep them from walking back out. By maintaining organized systems that handle information efficiently and reliably, you’ll give customers what they’re really looking for: peace of mind and an ease of doing business!

T.J. Tedesco is a “hands-on” marketing, sales, coaching and training consultant to the post press industry. He is the author of Binding, Finishing & Mailing: The Final Word, and Win Top-of-Mind Positioning, both published by GATFPress and available at Amazon.com. T.J. can be reached at (301) 294-9900 or tj@growsales.com.