5 Tips on How to Strengthen Your Company’s Customer Service

Strengthening your company’s customer service is essential for building and maintaining a reliable customer base. Even if you believe your customer service skills are already strong, there's always an opportunity for enhancement. Here, we offer five tips to elevate your skills to the next level. These tips include: hiring/training the right people, empowering your employees, reflective listening, establishing customer service policies, and feedback/continuous improvement.   Hiring and Training the Right People To start things on the right track, you should be hiring employees that have a positive outlook and are eager to learn. Studies show that employees who have a positive attitude are more likely to have long term success. Not only will that employee have personal success, but their attitude will motivate others in the workplace. Now that you have hired the right people, you need to set a comprehensive training program. This program should include product knowledge, how to communicate with customers, and conflict resolution. An employee needs a deep understanding of what your company is either selling or providing in order to communicate effectively. They also need to know how you would like them to communicate, ie should they be emailing or picking up the phone? An employee also needs to be trained on how to resolve certain issues that may arise in the workplace. Empowering Your Employees Let your customer service representatives have the opportunity to make decisions on their own. They should be able to resolve issues without any unnecessary escalation. This will lead to a faster response to the customer and then a quicker resolution. Also, make sure to keep motivating your customer service...

Navigating the Logistics Landscape: Why Reducing Variability is Key to Long Term Success

Removing variability from transportation management is critical in ensuring the overall efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and reliability of the logistics operations. By doing so, it can yield several benefits: Cost Efficiency: Constant changes can lead to unpredicted costs, which can negatively impact a company's bottom line. By reducing variability, a company can better predict and control its transportation spend. Improved Service: Variability can lead to delays or disruptions that affect customer service. Consistency in operations helps maintain service levels and customer satisfaction. Risk Management: A stable transportation process is less likely to encounter unforeseen issues or crises, thereby reducing the risk associated with the business. Performance Measurement and Improvement: It's easier to measure performance and implement improvements in a stable, less variable environment. By reducing variability, companies can more accurately assesstheir performance and identify areas for improvement. So how does a logistics organization reduce as much cost variability as possible? It really comes down to their overall approach when dealing with their carrier partners and how the procurement process is carried out. In times of extreme volatility, whether it’s in an oversold or undersold market, one's approach makes all the difference. Securing the lowest possible rate should be considered a short term strategy because low prices only benefit the shipper in the short term and may result in larger variability in the long run. Shippers need to be asking themselves several questions when potentially adding additional providers to their carrier network based solely on a lower rate structure. Does the provider have a proven track record in the markets they bid on? Can the provider seamlessly integrate with the TMS or are...