The Mheda Journal

During the course of working on this issue (April) of The MHEDA Journal, a common element that kept coming up was the importance of customer service. To be sure, customer service has always been a hot topic of conversation among MHEDA members. They know the value of the service they provide and its importance in separating themselves from the competition.

As MHEDA focuses on how “The Rules Have Changed” during their 2010 Convention, it’s interesting that quality customer service is one thing that isn’t changing. Time and again, MHEDA members are telling me that “we’ll still provide the same service” or “servicing the customer is more important than ever” or “they’re not buying, so it’s important to focus on servicing what they’ve already got.” Comments like these have been common during our 2010 Industry Forecast and since.

As one distributor says in repsonse to the question of whether the explosion of Internet selling is bad for distributor relationships, “We are not burying our heads in the sand and are using the internet more and more frequently to market our goods and services. contracts will be tested, but customer service disappears with low margins and value can still be sold.”

Today I received a newsletter from a consultant who bemoaned the state of customer service from his newspaper delivery person: “I haven’t seen my paper on my porch in years.” Fixing that is a small step in fixing the newspaper industry’s struggles in general, he argues.

It’s a lesser example, but I keep seeing it all around. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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Tags: best practices, material handling, service department, small business

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 2:44 pm and is filed under material handling, small business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.