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The obvious goal of every company is to make a profit, together with healthy margins. But depending on what kind of industry you are in, will probably drive how mature and aggressive your own market is.

In most markets competition is fierce, utility prices rise, materials costs increase and labour constantly goes up. Trying to maintain customer value while continuing to remain profitable can be really difficult.

There is, thank goodness help at hand for such companies that find themselves in such a position.

What Is Customer Value

A recent survey asking customers what they thought the term “customer value” actually meant came back with the following two responses:

• Companies actually do what they said they would
• And that those promises are delivered on the time scales promised

What the feedback is actually saying is that businesses above all keep to their commitments, and to be reliable. This does not matter if you are producing products or giving a service.

How Reliable Are You?

To measure how well you are keeping to your commitments is of critical importance to your business. And many companies do not actually analyse data that corresponds to this. Some businesses are just plain arrogant and consider they are performing well.

But if you actually start to try to understand this information, you might see that you are not performing well at all in terms of customer satisfaction. Some employees and managers try to bury KPI’s on service to deflect blame.

How To Build A Competitive Advantage

Some companies actually install an ethos of, “Do we really know, are are we just guessing?” this is actually a really good strategy. It questions the data, and how it is interpreted. If you are putting together a customer service strategy it is imperative it is on factual information.

There are tools to measure performance and to help deliver performance. These tools are well worth investing in, they can create operational disciplines that pertain directly to you, and are not just general .
Ensure that these tools give you the proper visibility on how you are actually performing, and can indicate cost implications to give full customer satisfaction. The critical issue here is in selecting the right metrics, stay focused, and give employees the correct directions.

By doing this your company will keep customers satisfied and still make a profit, so you can reinvest in the business and stay ahead of the competition.

How To Perform

“On time, in full” (OTIF) are the indicators that give you true customer satisfaction data. These OTIF’s will give information on mission critical performance elements. It will then be easy to see what is working and what is not.

Once you can identify any problems then you can do something about them. The proverbial stake is put in the ground and improvements are made on that. The correct tools will keep your business on track, and will give you a clear strategy on customer performance.

eCoachManager is a brilliant solution to manage transport management businesses, and if you have a Transport Business then eCoachManager will give you the metrics you need to stay on track with your customer performance.