Project Experience

Manufacturing…Today, Customer Service Is As Critical As Product

Client Situation
Services are becoming a vital part of the manufacturing world. In many cases, products are no longer the primary means for generating revenues. Top-of-the-line service operations have become a key competitive initiative. Manufacturers have had to offer total solutions to clients and end users. With manufacturers who distribute product through distributors, this is, of course are a prime example of this industry change. In one specific case, our client manufacturer sells its retail product to the end user through retail distributor stores. Those stores carry specific brands of product. A trend was developing where the distributors were changing to a different competitive brand once their contract was up. Our client wanted to know what approach the competitor was taking with the distributor to convince them to change allegiance. It was our task to understand the different offerings and the approach that the target was taking with the distributors.

Fuld Approach
Our client asked us to interview the distributors and learn the reasons for the switch, and we reviewed quality, prices and processes of the competitor company before our interviews with the distributorships. In this very qualitative study, we showed our client that the target was using effective sales approaches supported by actual quantitative measures and a quality product to convince the distributor to change over to their product brand.

Benefits and Implications
At the start of our research the client had the assumption that differences in product were responsible for the distributors' switches. Our research, however, revealed that the critical issues were technical and customer support. For more information on customer service studies in the manufacturing industry, contactnbulger@fuld.com.