We need to improve cooperation between departments. Sales wait until a job is booked to hand us another one to complete. We have no say in scheduling. We’re told to make it work. We get blamed for problems, even though we said from the beginning it wasn’t going to work.
Thoughts of the Day: Cooperation between departments is key. What buyers really want is a predictable experience. It takes teamwork to build loyal customers. Measure the different kinds of breakdowns that impact customers. Focus everyone on producing successes. Get salespeople the help they need, before they even know they need it. Know when to save the day by saying, “Can’t do it” before problems erupt.
Improve cooperation between departments
Having to fix problems is not only expensive, but it also destroys trust. Customers buy from you because they expect you can deliver as promised. When that fails to happen, customers start looking more carefully at what they’ve bought, and become more critical of any flaws they find.
Help operations people understand the importance of building customer loyalty through predictability. Show newcomers to the team how critically customers look at breakdowns. Start them out handling incoming customer complaints and responses, to show them how much time is wasted recovering from breakdowns.
Build customer loyalty through teamwork. Get people who produce what your company promises out into the field. Help them better understand what customers expect, and the conditions under which customers use your company’s products or services. Ask people who sell for your company to do a tour of duty in operations, to get their hands dirty producing goods or services to match customer orders. Ask them to help solve problems that crop up, so they have a deeper appreciation for the constraints under which people in operations do their work.
Join forces to solve problems
Track results and look for opportunities to improve by getting sales and operations staff together to discuss what to do. Set standards for error rate, breakdowns, missed delivery dates. Talk with both sides of the aisle, sales, and operations. Discuss and agree upon the yardstick to measure client success.
Encourage progress when results improve by celebrating successes, regardless of who on the team produced them. Whether it’s improved profit from sales, reduced production cost from operations, or increased customer loyalty through faster, more accurate, less error-prone delivery, everybody wins. Make sure everyone sees it that way – a team success.
Open up lines of communication between your company and its customers. Ask customers to participate in recognizing your team’s heroes and heroines. Have a formal introduction process in place for new customers, telling them who to go to when they need help. Get critical feedback right to the top by having customer service report directly to the top of the organization.
Increase collaboration skills
Ask operations staff to provide technical expertise that sales may not possess. Sales and operations people probably look at problems from different points of view. Strengthen the quality of your company’s sales and reduce the problems that result by combining resources before a sale is a done deal.
When making a promise to a customer, ask people to double and triple the time they think it will take and resist the temptation to over-promise. The worst that will happen is the customer will get it sooner and be thrilled. If the customer really and truly needs it sooner, go back and work through the production schedule. Check that another customer won’t get bumped.
Be smart enough to know when it’s necessary to say, “no”, to a sales opportunity, rather than ending up with a black eye after the fact because your team couldn’t meet either the delivery timeline or the quality standard the customer demanded.
Looking for a good book? The Effortless Experience: Conquering the new Battleground For Customer Loyalty, by Matthey Dixon, Nick Toman, Rick DiLisi.
