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.

Yesterday I spoke with Peele Dunn at Virginia Forklift in Richmond, VA, for a Sales Success Story. In addition to providing me the information for what’s going to turn out to be a great story about turning quality service into a sale, he also said some interesting things about the temptations associated with saving money in a bad economy.

In a nutshell, what he said was, it doesn’t always pay off to save a few bucks in the short term. The customer he referred to had bought used forklifts from a dealer out of state “because he saved a few bucks.” When the units soon broke down, that dealer was nowhere to be found, and the customer was out of luck. (Don’t worry, there’s a happy ending, which will be in the October issue of The MHEDA Journal.) “He tried to save a few bucks, but guess what? He really didn’t save a few bucks.” Which means, the customer made a decision to save now but it ended up costing money later. Isn’t that often the way?

It just goes to show that, especially now, when everyone is trying to cut back, it’s not always a good idea to do so. Sometimes decisions made for short-term gain aren’t the best decisions for the long haul.