The following is a recent edition of our e-newsletter: Know More. Do More. Our e-newsletter highlights the uses and benefits of business-to-business research and brings you timely examples of how companies are using research to achieve a competitive advantage.
Puritan Products, Inc., located in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, specializes in high purity chemicals and custom blended chemical formulations. Compliant in Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) and certified to ISO-9001:2008 quality management standards, it serves the global pharmaceutical, biotechnology, microelectronics, and laboratory markets. It’s an exciting time for Puritan Products as the company is currently celebrating 25 years.
Puritan Products’ ability to know what their customers want and to remain competitive in their market is extremely important throughout the entire company. Donna Long, Director of Marketing, explains, “Companies need to know where they stand with their customers. If they don’t, they are not being objective. You always have to ask yourself if you really know how you’re doing. Once you have a baseline for satisfaction, then you know how to make customers happy and how to enhance your capabilities. You can grow your company by utilizing customer data in terms of breadth of products and services, which ultimately impacts revenue.”
A fundamental instrument in Puritan Products’ effort to obtain the voice of the customer is their annual Customer Perception Survey. Puritan Products first contracted with Tweed-Weber in 2009 to help assist them with making a more formalized and repeatable customer feedback effort. Telephone interviews were conducted with customers the first year, followed by an online survey each year after to benchmark results. Erik Nowery, Product Manager, stated, “Surveying customers is an integral part of what we do, and it’s a source of pride throughout our organization. We take it very seriously and talk about the results at every level of the company. It’s one essential way that we measure ourselves. It all starts with our customers and how they feel. You really have nothing without them. They must be a constant priority in order to achieve success.”
Survey questions were developed in the areas of general market information, awareness of services/capabilities, overall perceptions of Puritan Products and its competitors, cGMP, compliance, quality, marketing, relationship management, and future trends and opportunities. These categories helped to obtain well-rounded feedback. According to Donna, “We try to cater to our strategic initiatives and use our customer survey as instructive feedback to measure ourselves, and then to develop new or modified initiatives. The survey has helped with so many growth and improvement efforts we have going on in the company. We’ve also created certain performance measures over the years that allow us to focus those efforts on what’s most important to our customers. We like to know, and need to know, how far we’ve come.”
At Tweed-Weber, we conduct customer surveys for our clients every day, and we see a whole range of satisfaction ratings. Puritan Products is consistently at the top of the heap with their ratings. Every year, customers comment on Puritan Products’ ability to be flexible partners, expedient with orders, and responsive in service in a way that is heads and tails above the competition. Erik explains, “Managing expectations and measuring what the customer is looking for to make their lives easier, instead of what we we’re looking for to make our lives easier, allows us to provide a better service experience. We really value the relationships we have with our customers. If someone has an issue, and we fix it fast, they remember that and trust us to do more.”
In response to their customer survey results, Puritan Products hired a tech service rep to better meet customer needs, and they changed how they measure their internal on-time shipping performance. Donna stated, “We like that we do so well, but we want to focus on areas for improvement. For instance, a direct result of our survey was that we developed an initiative to improve our on-time shipping. We’ve always measured our shipping timeliness as a part of our quality and performance metrics, but we learned that our customers were using different measures to define and rate our shipping performance. The minute we knew that, we put a system in place to match what they were using.”
Some of our clients tell us they are wary of hearing what their customers have to say because they are afraid of receiving bad news. Of course, we believe that’s even more of a reason to gather customer input. If there’s an issue lurking out there, you want to be able to address it and manage it to a positive conclusion. And if your fears are unfounded, it’s a shame to miss the opportunity to hear all the good news about your daily performance. Donna added, “Normally, you don’t get to hear about the really good stuff you’re doing. This survey process lets us hear it, and it feels great. When you hear good things about how you’re impacting customers, you tend to want to do even better.” As a perfect example, one customer of Puritan Products stated, “Puritan’s customer service personnel are the best of any I work with. They are all friendly and knowledgeable, and they follow-through with confirmations and special instructions flawlessly, without exception.”
At Tweed-Weber, we are always impressed by organizations that welcome customer feedback, and we believe Puritan Products is a model company for its enthusiastic and proactive efforts to do so. We enjoy quarterly, strategic discussions that can be referred to as “Greatness and Growlers,” where we talk about what’s working well, and what’s not. Those review meetings are always enlightening and help feed future survey initiatives. Tweed-Weber feels extremely fortunate to include Puritan Products as one of our valued clients, and more important, our friends.
We invite you to learn more about the strategic research services provided by Tweed-Weber, Inc. In a world of uncertainty, the ability to clearly focus your organization creates a distinct competitive advantage. No one can guarantee certainty, but Tweed-Weber can guarantee clarity. You will Know More, so you can Do More. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber).
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