How A&J Is Tackling Customer Service

Customer service is a rapidly evolving discipline that plays a major role in the a company’s long-term success. And in honor of National Customer Service Week 2021, we’re highlighting what A&J is specifically doing to ensure that our happy customers continue to do business with us.

How Has Customer Service Changed in the Past 10 Years?

As business models change, so does customer service. And undoubtedly with the proliferation of the internet, customer journeys have become more complex.

• According to Accenture, 61% of all B2B journeys start on the internet.
• McKinsey & Company estimates that improvements in customer experience can lead to a 10% to 15% reduction in customer churn, 20% to 40% increase in win rates of offers, and 50% lower costs to serve. On average, B2B companies’ typical customer experience scores fall below 50%! We absolutely want to be an exception to that!
• More than one in four buyers anticipate that automation is going to change the B2B buying role in the next 5 years.

Your #1 Priority: Speed

Time is your greatest resource. And we realize that offering a fast and efficient B2B customer journey is what can help elevate your experience with us.

One of first priorities is freeing up our team’s time to focus on quick responses. We want them to respond quickly, as well as engaging in meaningful, relationship-building interactions. Our current first response time is 1 business day to all standard quote requests.

We’ve invested in an ERP system to connect all of our relevant systems. The right software has helped us automate manual processes, manage customer interactions, collect feedback and use time and resources efficiently. But, there’s always still work to be done to ensure that our tech stack is well synchronized to deliver a fast and streamlined customer experience.

Your #2 & #3 Priority: Ease & Consistency

In an effort to remove friction from our buying process, we’ve spent the past year improving the usability of our website. While you can’t directly place orders on our site, we’ve taken significant steps to organize and build a knowledgebase so that each customer can better understand the racks and kits/accessories that we have available. We’ve answered your most frequently asked questions into a customer-facing webpage and will continue creating and adding helpful documentation in a centralized hub. The goal is to continue to grow this into whitepapers, infographics, videos, eBooks and other resources. If you discover that we’re lacking in information or you don’t see a topic covered, please don’t hesitate to let us know!

We also realize that it’s common for you to use multiple channels and have several different stakeholders involved at each stage of the buying process, so we’ve done the work to keep the same message consistent across our website, on the phone or via email. All interactions with our employees and staff should be seamless.

Your #4 Priority: Transparency

Whatever channel you use, we always strive for transparency. Not only do we want to set the right expectations and ensure no nasty surprises, but we want to build trust. In addition to being responsive, we commit to the following:

• Communicating the correct pricing, order calculations and shipping terms from the beginning. All quotes provided will be honored for 90 days before expiration.
• Acknowledging mistakes
• Providing access to order statuses and other changing information in near real-time