Are Your Suppliers Letting You Down?

 

While I was driving along the motorway recently, a truck threw up a stone that cracked my windscreen. When I got home I phoned State Insurance to lodge a claim. Much to my surprise they were great to deal with. I was able to get through to a live human being before my next birthday and she was very helpful. No unnecessary questions were asked. No obstacles were placed in my path. The woman I spoke with was friendly, polite and efficient. I even got more than I expected because I thought I would have find a windshield repairer and contact them with a claim number. But no, I was told someone from Smith & Smith would be in touch with me within four hours. In short the experience was wonderful and I was delighted.

Then the fun began.

Within three hours I had a text from Smith & Smith asking me to phone an 0800 number, push 1 then 1 and quote the registration number of my car, which they kindly listed in the text. Unfortunately it was the wrong registration number. Still, that was no big deal and I rang the number as requested.  Sure enough I got the two prompts and pushed 1 each time. Then I waited. Eventually I got a recorded message apologising for the delay and saying someone would be with me soon. They were not. After getting the "sorry for the delay" message several times, I heard the phone ringing at the other end. Great, I thought, now I am finally being connected to someone who can help me. My optimism was premature. What I got was a recorded message saying I would be put through to somebody who could help me. The phone rang again and this time it was answered by an actual person. I told her why I was calling. "OK," she said. "But they are all busy right now. I'll get somebody to phone you back."

It seemed to me I was right back where I started. I hung up, and replied to the original text saying, "You asked me to call you. I did. It was a waste of time. Would you please call me?" By the end of the day nobody had called so I called again and this time I got through and an appointment was made. I was told I would have to go to my nearest branch of Smith & Smith because the type of car I owned meant they could not come to me and replace the windscreen at my place. So, I took my car to Smith & Smith and killed two and a half hours while they did the work. When I returned to collect my car, I was told the windscreen had been replaced but it was not the correct windscreen and I would need to have another windscreen installed the following week. To make my life easier, I was told, they would come to me to do the work. I asked why I had to bring it in the first time but they could come to me the second time. There was no answer to that.

State Insurance clearly understand how important it is to provide their customers with a great experience. More importantly, they seem to understand that customers want to deal with companies that are easy to do business with, and with people who are efficient, friendly, helpful and polite. State also knows customers like to be delighted, which comes from doing something above and beyond what the customer expects. What State does not appear to realise is that all their hard work is being undone by one of their key suppliers. Consequently, my overall customer experience getting my windscreen repaired was less than average.  

Are you in the same situation? I expect you are passionate about giving your customers a great experience and work very hard to do that. Is all your hard work being undone by one of your key suppliers? Would you know if it was?

Remember when ISO 9000 was all the rage? Many companies required their suppliers gained ISO certification because it would mean they would have to demonstrate their processes were effective (they gave customers what they wanted) and efficient (there was minimal waste). ISO also requires companies to identify areas of non-performance, report them and fix them. Therefore, a customer like State could easily audit a supplier such as Smith & Smith to assess how well they are performing. Most importantly, if State found performance issues with a supplier, they could see whether the supplier was taking steps to improve their performance.

You could require your suppliers to be ISO accredited but here are six actions you can take to find out whether they are giving your customers the kind of experience you want them to have:

1. Make follow up phone calls to customers you have placed in the hands of your suppliers to find out what kind of experience they had.  

 2.  Mystery shop your suppliers.

 3.  Ask your suppliers to show you data from their customer satisfaction surveys, complaints registers or customer feedback systems. If they cannot do this, alarm bells should sound.

 4.  Ask to see their plan for managing the customer experience.

 5.  Make a site visit and talk to both management and frontline staff about what they see are their customer care issues and what they are doing to fix them.

 6. Insist your suppliers set up a Corrective Action System where things that go wrong are logged and the action taken to fix them is recorded.

In a crowded and competitive market, it is difficult enough to get and keep customers without having your suppliers undermining what you are doing.