As I progressed in my career and moved to other distributors, something clicked. The products we sold at Grainger? They were the same products we were selling at my new company. Same manufacturers. Same specifications. Same availability.

What was different? The experience we brought to customers. And that’s become the only real differentiator in today’s world.

The Evolution from Transactions to Touchpoints

Moving up through operations and into leadership roles, my perspective shifted again. It became less about individual transactions and more about how we were delivering experience across all the touchpoints in our business. That’s the real win in any customer experience work you do.

You need to understand all the points where your customer touches your business and know how each one is performing. Here’s the thing that keeps executives up at night: you can have an amazing experience up front with placing an order and receiving a delivery, but if you have a not-so-great experience on the back end when the customer wants to pay the invoice, all the work you’ve done up front has completely fallen apart because that one touchpoint failed.

I’ve seen it happen. A distributor invests in improving quote turnaround times, trains their counter staff to be more responsive, and optimizes their delivery routes for speed. All excellent work. Then customers hit accounts receivable with a billing question and suddenly they’re waiting three days for a call back or dealing with an inflexible credit policy. One weak link in the chain undermines everything else.

The Two Ways Customer Experience Initiatives Fail

I’ve lived through both extremes of how companies approach customer experience measurement, and both miss the mark.

At Grainger, we did surveys every quarter. The consistency was there. That’s because we measured religiously. But much of what we got back wasn’t actionable. We’d see scores, we’d track trends, but we didn’t have clear direction on exactly what to fix or where to focus. Valuable information, collected regularly, but not translating into concrete operational improvements.

At another company I worked for, we went the opposite direction. We’d do surveys occasionally when someone decided it was time. No consistent rhythm. No follow-through. And we shouldn’t have been shocked that we never got any better. We weren’t measuring consistently, and when we did measure, the insights weren’t specific enough to drive action.

Both approaches fail for the same fundamental reason: they’re missing the continuous improvement loop. It’s not enough to measure frequently if you don’t know what to do with the data. And it’s not enough to get actionable insights if you only measure once and never verify whether your changes worked.

The Measurement Cycle That Actually Works

Real progress comes from a complete cycle: measure what matters to customers at each touchpoint, analyze the results to identify specific operational gaps, implement targeted improvements based on those findings, then measure again to verify those changes moved the needle. This sustains the gains you’ve made. It’s continuous. It’s actionable. And it’s the only way to systematically improve customer experience rather than just tracking it.

Just today, I was reviewing results with a distributor who’s been following this approach. 18 months ago, their Net Promoter Score was 61—already superior performance by industry standards. But they didn’t rest on that. They continually and systematically measured to get better. They identified specific gaps between what customers valued and how they were performing, made targeted operational adjustments, measured again to confirm improvement, and then built those improvements into their standard operating procedures. Their latest score? 73. They went from good to exceptional by treating experience as a continuous improvement process, not a one-time achievement.

That kind of sustained improvement isn’t unusual when distributors commit to the full cycle. We typically see 12% to 18% improvement in customer satisfaction scores within the first year for companies that measure consistently, get actionable insights into what specifically to fix, implement those changes and measure again to track progress.

But here’s where many distribution companies stumble: they make improvements and see scores rise, then assume the work is done. Six months later, performance slides back. Why? Because they didn’t sustain the improvements. The cycle isn’t measure-analyze-improve-done. It’s measure-analyze-improve-sustain-measure again. You need to lock in the gains by updating training materials, revising standard procedures, and continuing to monitor performance so improvements become permanent rather than temporary fixes.

The pattern is consistent: identify the specific touchpoints where performance lags what customers care about, make concrete operational changes, verify those changes moved the needle, build them into your ongoing operations, then start the cycle again. Not measurement for measurement’s sake. Not occasional surveys that gather dust. A real loop that drives lasting improvement.

One distributor told us recently that their customer satisfaction metrics have become “our barometer of what to do.” Not a nice-to-have data point filed away somewhere. The actual guide for resource allocation and operational priorities—measured consistently, acted on specifically, sustained through process changes, and verified through the next measurement cycle.

The Real Product Sitting on Your Shelf

Walk into any distribution warehouse and you’ll see rows of products. But talk to the customers who keep coming back, and they’ll tell you something different. They’re not buying your ball bearings. They’re buying the fact that when their production line goes down at 4:30 on a Friday, you answer the phone. They’re buying the reality that your inside sales team knows their operation well enough to catch a potentially wrong order before it ships. They’re buying the seamless experience from quote to delivery to invoice.

They’re buying every interaction they have with you.

This isn’t just intuition. When you measure what drives customer loyalty, asking them to rate not just their overall satisfaction but the importance and performance of specific touchpoints like delivery precision, quote turnaround, credit flexibility, and billing accuracy—patterns emerge. The companies that excel at the handful of things customers genuinely care about across the entire journey. They keep those customers. The ones that excel at one or two touchpoints but fail at others? Well, price becomes the tiebreaker.

What This Means For Your Operation

Here’s where most distribution companies get stuck. They invest millions of dollars in inventory, hundreds of thousands of dollars in warehouse automation, significant capital in fleet vehicles. All critical investments. But then they treat customer experience like an afterthought—something the customer service department handles when there’s a problem.

That’s backwards.

Your inventory management system tells you exactly how many units of each stock-keeping unit (SKU) you’re carrying. But can you tell me with the same precision how long customers wait on hold? How many times must the average buyer call to get an order update? How satisfied they are with your billing process? Whether your credit terms align with what matters to them?

The distributors winning in competitive markets treat customer experience with the same rigor they apply to inventory turns and fill rates. They measure it systematically tracking not just whether customers are satisfied overall, but which specific capabilities matter most to them at each touchpoint and where performance gaps exist. They get actionable insights that point to concrete fixes. They implement those improvements. They sustain those changes by embedding them into standard procedures. Then they measure again to verify progress holds.

A distributor might discover their Arizona branch has slow quote turnaround times that don’t exist in California. They address it by revising the quoting workflow. Six months later, they measure again to confirm Arizona’s performance improved. Then they update training materials and performance metrics to sustain the improvement. Or they find that construction customers rate them lower than manufacturing customers on delivery precision. They adjust delivery processes for construction accounts, train drivers on the new standards, and track whether satisfaction moved—and stayed there.

These aren’t massive strategic problems requiring complete overhauls. They’re specific, fixable issues at individual touchpoints that directly impact whether customers stay or leave—and the only way to know if your fixes worked and stuck is to keep the measurement cycle going.

The Interchangeable Product Problem

When products become commodities, purchasing behavior shifts. Price matters, but it stops being the only thing that matters.

A purchasing manager facing identical products at similar prices will choose the distributor that makes their job easier across the entire transaction. The one that provides accurate order tracking. The one whose team responds to emails within an hour instead of a day. The one that handles returns without an interrogation. The one whose billing is straightforward and whose credit team understands their business cycles.

Your competition isn’t just other distributors anymore. It’s Amazon Business setting expectations for same-day delivery transparency. It’s consumer experiences training buyers to expect real-time updates and frictionless transactions at every step.

The gap between what customers experience in their personal lives and what they tolerate in business-to-business (B2B) transactions is closing fast.

What Changes Monday Morning

Stop treating customer experience as something you understand intuitively and start measuring it with the same discipline you apply to financial metrics. But don’t just measure—make sure you’re getting actionable insights that tell you specifically what to fix. Ask customers what matters most to them at each stage of doing business with you, then track how you’re performing on those specific dimensions across every touchpoint.

Then—and this is the part most companies skip—do something about what you learn. Make targeted operational adjustments based on clear priorities. Build those changes into your standard procedures so they stick. And measure again in six months to see if those changes moved the needle and held. That’s the continuous improvement loop that works.

The insights won’t require a complete business transformation. More often, they’ll point to specific operational adjustments at touchpoints that have outsized impact on retention. It’s integrating customer feedback directly into your customer relationship management (CRM) system, so your sales team sees it in real time. It’s identifying that your Milwaukee customers are genuinely satisfied across the board while your Phoenix customers love your sales team but struggle with inventory availability. It’s discovering that your accounts receivable process is the weak link undermining otherwise robust performance.

These aren’t abstract improvements. They’re concrete changes that protect revenue—but only if you have consistency in measurement, actionable insights that tell you what specifically to improve, and the discipline to sustain those improvements through process changes and ongoing monitoring.

Your products are increasingly interchangeable. Your experience across every touchpoint doesn’t have to be. But you need the complete cycle: measure consistently, get actionable insights, implement specific improvements, sustain those gains and measure again to verify progress holds.

 Are you measuring customer experience consistently enough to track real trends? Are your measurements telling you specifically what to fix? And when you make improvements, are you building them into your operations so they last?

That’s the difference between a measurement program and a continuous improvement system that protects revenue.

The post Your Product Isn’t What Customers Are Really Buying appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

I was lucky enough to begin my career at Grainger, and they taught me early that the lens of the customer is the most important one you have. What I learned there, and with every company since, is that looking at the business through the lens of the value stream is how you make improvements that matter.

At one of those companies, I watched a good account walk out the door, and not one department thought it was their fault. Sales had hit quota on that account. Customer service had closed every ticket inside its service window. The warehouse posted a 98% fill-rate that month. Credit has done its job protecting us from a slow-pay risk. Every scoreboard reads green. The customer still left and took 11 years of purchases with them.

The bottom line: customer experience is a company-wide responsibility that crosses every function you run. It must be a team effort because no other way works. Most distributors manage it as if a single team can own it. That’s backwards. And it’s why so many improvement efforts stall after the first survey.

The Myth of Customer Experience (CX) Ownership

The instinct, when a leadership team decides customer experience matters, is to name an owner. Hand it to marketing because they run surveys. Hand it to customer service because they answer the phones. Create a customer experience (CX) manager and check the box.

Back at Grainger, we relied heavily on cross-functional teams, and the person in charge usually wasn’t from customer service. It was the person who could impact that problem the most. Their job ran past their own department. They had to bring the rest of the departments along, so that when we implemented a solution it didn’t break something else in the value chain. That distinction matters.

Here’s the reality of our industry. There’s rarely a formal customer experience (CX) title. Marketing usually spearheads the data because they own the survey. You can even name an owner. None of that changes what the work is. Whoever you put in charge inherits responsibility for an outcome and authority over almost none of the inputs. They can’t set credit policy. They can’t change the warehouse slotting that drives short ships. They can’t rewrite how sales set delivery expectations. So, they do the one thing within reach: they send more surveys, build prettier dashboards, and watch the number sit flat, while the actual drivers of dissatisfaction live in the other departments that never got the memo.

You can assign a steward for customer experience. You cannot delegate it. Those are different things and confusing them is where most distributors get stuck.

Why Customer Experience (CX) is a Team Sport

Walk one order through your building and watch how many hands touch the customer.

Marketing sets expectations before the customer ever calls. Sales make the promise on price, availability, and delivery. Customer service fields the question when something’s unclear. Operations and the warehouse pick, pack, and ship it, and decide whether it arrives complete and on time. Inventory and supply chain decide whether the item was even there to sell. Finance, through credit and billing, decides whether the order ships today or sits on hold, and whether the invoice is clean or triggers a dispute. Executive leadership decides whether any of these groups get measured on the customer’s experience or only on their own departmental number.

Lay your touchpoints out on a wall and you’ll count a lot more boxes than people. They don’t map one to one. Eight or nine names end up owning all of them, and which names matter depends on the touchpoint you decide to fix. The divisions are also finer than the organizational chart admits. Inside finance alone, the credit manager who puts an order on hold isn’t the billing clerk who lets a bad invoice go out. Same department, two different players, two different ways to lose a customer.

The customer doesn’t see eight or nine departments. They see one company, and they judge you on the weakest link in the chain. A flawless sales relationship doesn’t survive, a billing department that fights every credit. A great price doesn’t survive, a backorder nobody communicated.

The Problem with Departmental Thinking

Now it gets dangerous. Every department optimizes the metric it’s measured on, and each one looks like a winner while the customer’s experience erodes.

Say you’ve got a credit problem. The worst thing you can do is hand it to the credit manager and tell them to fix it. They will. They’ll fix it for credit, optimize it for their number, and in the process create a problem for sales, for service, for inventory. The fix is local and the damage is company wide. Multiply that across every function: credit tightens terms to protect days sales outstanding (DSO), and a customer who’s bought from you reliably for a decade gets treated like a flight risk. The warehouse hits its fill-rate target by shipping the easy lines complete and shorting the one item the customer built their job around. Sales books the order and moves on, never flagging that the delivery date was optimistic. Each manager defends their number on Monday. Each number is real. The customer is still unhappy, and no single report shows why.

This is the part operators understand from the plant floor: you can run every workstation at peak efficiency and still ship a bad product, because the problem lives in the handoffs, not the stations. Customer issues always originate in one department and surface in another. The credit hold becomes the service team’s angry phone call. The slotting decision becomes the salesperson’s lost renewal. Look at only department by department and you’ll never find the root cause, because the root cause is the seam between two departments that don’t share a scoreboard.

A Value-Stream Approach to Customer Experience

Stop managing customer experience as a set of departments and start managing it as a value stream. A value stream is the full end-to-end sequence of activities that carries a customer from first request to delivered product—the whole path, not any one department’s piece of it. It’s the same discipline you’d apply to any operational process improvement, pointed at the customer instead of the warehouse.

One of the companies I worked with made every one of us own a value stream. Not in your department. A value stream that cut across all of them. Owning it meant owning the whole path—the handoff coming into each department, the work that happened inside it, and the handoff back out to the next one. You had to walk into credit, into the warehouse, into billing, into customer service, and learn what each group did, how they did it, and how their piece landed on the customer. It was uncomfortable, and it was the most useful thing I did that year, because it forced me to see the handoffs instead of the boxes. That’s what real ownership of customer experience looks like: somebody who can shepherd a problem all the way through the organization rather than optimize one stop on it. Doing it this way forces you to think of the customer first and see it through that lens.

Map the full journey the way the customer travels it: discovery, quote, order, credit approval, fulfillment, delivery, invoicing, support, reorder. Then ask three questions at every step. Who owns this touchpoint? What does the customer expect here? And how do we know whether we’re delivering it? Most distribution leaders can’t answer the third question with data at more than half the steps. That gap is the whole problem.

A value stream needs shared visibility. Everyone must see the same customer, the same feedback, the same metric, at the same time. The credit manager needs to see that the account they just put on hold is one your top rep has been nurturing for two years. The warehouse needs to see that the line they shorted last week is the reason a customer rated delivery a two. When the data sits in silos, nobody owns the seams, and the seams are where you lose customers.

How the Cross-Functional Team Operates

A cross-functional team lives or dies on how it’s run. I won’t tell you what your org chart should look like, because a single-branch distributor and a national platform don’t share one. The mechanics, though, travel everywhere. Five rules separate a committee that meets from a team that moves.

Pick the lead by leverage, not title. The person who can move the problem the most runs the team, whether that’s the credit manager, the ops lead, or a service supervisor. When the problem changes, the lead changes.

Charter it around the value stream, not a department. The mandate is the customer’s path through the issue, start to finish. The lead doesn’t fix their own piece and hand it off. They carry the fix across every department it touches.

Put everyone on one scoreboard. While the team is working, every member is measured on the customer outcome, not their own departmental number. Drop that rule and the credit manager goes right back to protecting days sales outstanding (DSO).

Give it decision rights and a clock. The team meets on a fixed cadence, makes calls that cross department lines, and escalates the minute it hits a wall it can’t clear. A team that needs permission for every cross-functional move die of slowness.

Disband it when the seam is fixed. Then stand up the next one around the next problem. The capability is permanent. Any single team is temporary.

Get those five right and you stop coordinating departments. You start moving as one company toward the customer.

How Technology Enables Cross-Functional customer experience (CX) Management

This is where good intentions die for a practical reason: you can’t shepherd a problem across eight or nine departments if you can’t see the customer in one place. Spreadsheets, an annual survey, and a gut feel won’t get you there. You need a dedicated customer experience platform built to do the cross-functional work, not just collect feedback.

A platform earns its place when it does three things your spreadsheets can’t. It centralizes feedback so every department reads from the same source instead of trading anecdotes. It surfaces the ownership gaps, the touchpoints where the customer is struggling and no one’s accountable. And it shows you how much each capability matters to the customer, not only how you score on it, so you invest where it moves the relationship instead of where it’s easy.

That’s the design philosophy behind Customer Experience RX, the platform we built at DSG specifically for distributors. It puts importance and performance side by side on every capability, benchmarks you against other distributors, and lets you slice feedback by segment, geography, and job function in one portal every department can open. One distributor used it to target the improvements that mattered most to their customers and moved their Net Promoter Score from 57 to 70 in a single year.

What matters is what the tool makes possible: one version of the truth is that finance, sales, service, and operations all trust enough to act on together. A platform won’t fix your customer experience. It gives your leadership team the shared visibility and accountability to fix it themselves.

The Leadership Takeaway

Customer experience is the main differentiator left in distribution. Product lines converge, prices get matched, and the company that wins is the one the customer trusts to get it right across the whole relationship. That’s a leadership problem before it’s a software problem.

What changes Monday morning:

Stop asking which department owns customer experience. Own it yourself, at the leadership level, and build the cross-functional team to carry it, led by whoever can impact the problem most and bring the other departments along. Map the value stream. Put one source of customer truth in front of all eight or nine stakeholders. Measure importance alongside performance so you invest in what customers value. Then do the unglamorous work of fixing the seams between departments, because that’s where your customers are quietly deciding whether to stay.

Your competitors are still arguing about whose fault the last lost account was. Get your teams looking at the same customer, and you’ll stop having that argument. That’s the game.

The post Customer Experience Is Everybody’s Job appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

W.W. Grainger is embedding artificial intelligence across customer service, finance, warehouse operations, and ecommerce as the company expands AI from isolated applications into core business infrastructure, chairman and CEO DG. Macpherson told analysts during the company’s recent first-quarter earnings call.

Macpherson said Grainger’s AI deployments now fall into two primary categories: internal productivity and customer-facing digital capabilities.

On the operational side, the company is using AI tools to support customer service agents, automate finance and back-office workflows and improve supply chain execution inside distribution centers. Macpherson said Grainger is also applying AI to drive more “one-piece flow” within warehouse operations, an approach designed to improve throughput and operational efficiency.

The second category focuses on ecommerce and customer experience. Macpherson said AI-powered search and merchandising enhancements are becoming increasingly important to Grainger’s long-term competitive position.

“It is pervasive and will be even more so,” Macpherson said. “Pointing at the right things to create advantage, in addition to driving productivity, is really important.”

Macpherson also pointed to AI initiatives at Zoro, Grainger’s endless-assortment ecommerce business, which reported 18.7% daily sales growth in the first quarter.

He said the Zoro team has focused on improving customer acquisition quality and increasing repeat purchases, with AI-enabled website improvements expected to drive additional margin expansion and revenue growth over time. Macpherson said those enhancements were not yet fully reflected in first-quarter financial results but are expected to contribute more materially as deployment expands.

The AI discussion came during a strong earnings quarter for Grainger. Grainger reported higher first quarter sales and earnings as growth in its North American operations and digital businesses offset continued tariff and geopolitical uncertainty.

The Chicago-based distributor said first quarter sales increased 10.1% year over year to $4.74 billion, up from $4.31 billion in the same period last year. Net earnings attributable to the company rose 15.9% to $555 million from $479 million a year earlier.

Operating earnings increased 18.0% to $793 million from $672 million in the prior-year quarter, while gross profit rose 10.9% to $1.90 billion from $1.71 billion.

Jonny LeRoy, Grainger senior vice president and chief technology officer, will deliver the closing keynote on June 25 from 11:15 to noon at Distribution Strategy Group’s Applied AI for Distributors conference

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The post Grainger Embeds AI Across Warehouse Operations, Customer Service and Ecommerce appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

According to Amazon, the AI agents can recommend actions, retrieve accounts, or order information, and execute tasks on behalf of human representatives. In an example provided by the company, an agent can guide a representative through processing a product return by automatically pulling order history, calculating refund amounts, and initiating the return. The agents also evaluate conversation context and customer sentiment in real time, preparing documentation and handling repeatable steps so representatives can focus on more complex situations.

AWS said companies can deploy out-of-the-box agents or customize behaviors and actions to match internal service policies.

What It Means for Distributors

The announcement comes as distributors face growing pressure to deliver faster, more consistent post-purchase service across ecommerce, phone, chat, and inside-sales channels. Distributors field large volumes of questions tied to order status, delivery delays, returns, warranty claims, credits, and product identification. AI agents that automatically surface ERP order data or initiate returns could meaningfully reduce handling times and the need for manual lookups.
Variability in service standards across branch networks is a long-running challenge. Automated, AI-guided workflows can enforce the same policies for returns, replacements, and credits, reducing errors and margin-eroding exceptions.

Many distributors still rely on legacy PBX systems, siloed CRM environments, or manual processes. As AWS deploys agentic automation directly into Amazon Connect, the performance gap widens between modernized contact centers and operations that continue to depend on human-only workflows.

The new capabilities signal how agentic systems may eventually take on larger portions of troubleshooting, quoting, and multi-step service workflows. In this model, humans handle exceptions and relationship management while AI completes structured tasks in the background.

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The post Amazon’s New AI Agents Raise Customer Service Stakes for Distributors appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

Jamison Dohn has been named vice president of supply chain, following his tenure as vice president of customer experience for the northeast region. In his new role, Dohn will lead supplier strategy and negotiations, oversee category management and inventory execution, and manage a team focused on supplier performance and supply chain resiliency.

Replacing Dohn in the Northeast region is Rodney Iams, who steps into the role of vice president of customer experience. Iams was promoted to vice president of commercial in 2024, after serving as regional sales manager since 2022.

Stellar Industrial Supply distributes more than 90,000 MRO products and tools from over 1,500 brands across 18 regional hubs in the U.S., and serves customers in Canada and Mexico. The company supports a range of industries including metalworking, aerospace, marine supply, and general manufacturing.

Since launching its Documented Cost Savings (DCS) program in 2010, Stellar says it has generated more than $213 million in customer-verified savings, including nearly $18 million in 2024.

In May Stellar Industrial Suppl signed a definitive agreement to acquire Rocky Mountain Cutting Tools (RMCT), a Frederick, Colorado-based metalworking distributor focused on advanced tooling and technical support for manufacturers.

The transaction marked Stellar’s 18th regional hub as the company continues its expansion across the U.S.

The acquisition gives Stellar a strong foothold in the Denver metropolitan area and Colorado Front Range region—an area with a growing base of manufacturers, machine shops, and aerospace contractors. It also adds deep expertise in precision cutting tools and CNC machining technologies, further strengthening Stellar’s technical capabilities in metalworking, the company said.

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The post Stellar Industrial Supply Appoints New Vice Presidents for Supply Chain and Customer Experience appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

Here’s what they shared.

Missed the webinar? You can watch it here on-demand.

Customer Experience is Everyone’s Job

Most distributors sell products customers can get elsewhere. What makes a lasting impression, Heller said, is the experience: how easy you are to work with, how reliable you are and how much customers trust you.

Langdon shared how Stellar Industrial has shifted its organizational mindset to put customer experience at the front. “We renamed Operations to Customer Experience,” she said. “It puts a whole different lens on every activity. Everyone—from the person picking an order to the branch managers, who are now called customer experience managers—understands their role in the customer journey.”

“There isn’t one person in our organization who isn’t responsible for customer experience,” Langdon added. “When you connect the dots for employees about how their role impacts the customer, it changes behavior and builds accountability.”

Kuntz echoed that sentiment, noting that at Palmer-Donavin exceptional experience starts with simple, honest communication. “You’re not overcomplicating it. It’s being open, getting customers the answers they need quickly, and anticipating their needs based on data and past behavior,” she said.

“When you understand your customers’ history and their expectations, you aren’t just reacting, you’re proactively solving their problems before they even call you.”

Technology Should Enhance, Not Complicate, Customer Experience

The panelists agreed that technology is essential, but only when it improves customer experience. “The minute you feel like you’re fighting technology, something’s wrong,”  Langdon said.

Kuntz described how they learned this lesson firsthand at Palmer-Donavin. After launching a chatbot on their website, they quickly realized it wasn’t a fit for their customers, at least not yet. “We pulled it down within four hours. We realized we needed to meet our customers where they are. Instead, we’re using AI internally first, so our team can refine it before we ever expose it externally,” she said.

Both leaders stressed that the goal isn’t just more technology; it’s about better, more seamless service.

“If your internal systems aren’t easy to use, it’s going to translate to poor service externally. Ease of doing business has to start inside your company,” Langdon said.

Clean Customer Data is Critical 

If distributors want to personalize customer experiences, they must start with clean, reliable data.

Kuntz emphasized the importance of maintaining data hygiene in CRM systems. “We don’t allow sales reps to just add contacts. We control that process tightly,” she said. Palmer-Donavin even switched marketing platforms to fully integrate CRM and their marketing efforts, so that every contact record stays clean and actionable.

“Our CRM is our single source of truth,” Kuntz said. “We transitioned our marketing automation to Microsoft Marketing so everything from contact records and segmentation to customer preferences lives in one system.”

Langdon added that the data should reflect each customer’s influence, needs and role within their organization. “The more you understand the customer, the more you can meet their needs,” she said. Distributors should understand the customer’s influence level, how long they’ve been at their company and how their decisions impact the buying process.

The Importance of Training 

One key challenge in building a customer-centric culture is balancing employee empowerment with the need for consistency.

Langdon said that empowerment without training is useless. “You can empower someone all day long, but if they don’t know what to do, it’s not going to happen,” she said. Stellar gives employees guardrails: empowering them to “do the right thing without betting the farm.”

“We don’t leave employees guessing. We give them structured training, clear expectations and shared services support so they can focus on solving customer problems quickly and confidently,” Langdon said.

At Palmer-Donavin, Kuntz said that their employee ownership structure reinforces this mindset. “Our number one principle is ‘think and act like an owner,’” she said. “That mindset supports empowerment with responsibility.”

Both Stellar Industrial and Palmer-Donavin use Customer Experience Rx, a specialized solution for distributors from Distribution Strategy Group.

Langdon said that customer feedback is vital, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. “We also measure operational KPIs like on-time delivery and order accuracy down to the branch level. You have to look beyond financial metrics to truly gauge customer satisfaction.”

Palmer-Donavin has seen strong results, with NPS scores typically ranging in the 60s and 70s. But Kuntz said that they also use qualitative feedback to highlight successes and coach improvement areas. “We export all customer comments and highlight when employees are mentioned by name. It reinforces positive behavior internally,” she said.

“Celebrating the wins is just as important as fixing the misses,” Langdon said. “When you recognize and replicate what’s working, you build a positive momentum across the organization.”

Kuntz said that looking at trends across locations has helped Palmer-Donavin prioritize where to invest in process improvements, ensuring customer experience remains consistent even as they grow.

Customers Expect More

One major shift Langdon sees is the move toward deeper customer partnerships. “Customers are making us part of their team,” she said. “They expect us to be proactive, to tell them about usage trends before they even ask. Expectations are higher than ever.”

“We’re no longer just a supplier; we’re a partner embedded in their business operations,” Langdon said. “That means we need to anticipate their needs, not just react to them.”

Kuntz said that internal collaboration across sales, marketing and customer service is crucial to meeting those expectations. “Customer experience can’t live in just one department. It’s a companywide effort,” she said.

Both leaders agreed that customers now expect real-time visibility, proactive communications and personalized service. Companies that can’t deliver risk losing business to more agile competitors.

Be Intentional About Culture 

Perhaps the most important takeaway was the importance of an intentional culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” Heller said. A culture of continuous improvement and customer focus doesn’t happen by accident; it must be nurtured.

Distributors that build organizations where every employee owns customer experience, supported by the right technology and data, will lead the way.

“If the employee experience is good, the customer experience will be good. It all works together,” Langdon said.

“When employees feel empowered, supported, and trusted, it shows up in every customer interaction,” Kuntz said. “Culture isn’t just about values on a wall; it’s about what people live out every day.”

Watch the full program on-demand.

The post How Distributors Are Making Customer Experience Part of Their DNA appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

AI agents can change that. 

On the surface, AI agents may not seem much different from other automation tools. But AI agents don’t just automate tasks; they can improve how distributors serve customers. AI agents aren’t just programmed to follow rules – they learn, adapt and act. They anticipate problems before they happen. And they take on repetitive tasks, so your team can focus on delivering value. 

They are the next evolution of AI. 

They also require little human intervention. For example, OCR-based automation may extract order data from an email but still require human verification before putting it in the ERP. AI agents would understand the context of the email, pull the order data, update all systems, check the warehouse, apply rules (ie, customer pricing or delivery requirements) and complete the order. All without the human touch. 

AI agents have the potential to significantly improve the B2B customer experience. 

B2B buyers now use an average of 10 channels to interact in their purchasing journey, according to McKinsey. But too often, distributors struggle to keep up. An XM Institute study found that 69% of practitioners cite competing priorities as a significant obstacle to improving customer experience. And more than half blame technology limitations, including poor system integration. 

AI agents can bridge this gap. 

Customer experience matters. The difference between acquiring and not acquiring a customer could be the time it takes to return a quote. It also matters in retaining customers: If your experience is slow, error-ridden and inconsistent across channels, your customers may not stick around for the long haul. 

You can’t provide the experience customers are looking for today, however, without a combination of a great team and the right technology. 

Here’s how AI agents will change the game when it comes to customer experience: 

They will reduce friction. 

AI agents can remove friction by tackling the most time-consuming manual processes first, like automating order intake, validating pricing and invoice matching. That can drive a smoother experience on the front end of a transaction whether customers are ordering via email, EDI or an online portal. 

They’ll allow distributors to be faster and more accurate. 

Speed and accuracy are critical for distributors, where delays and errors can have ripple effects on your customers’ operations. AI agents can instantly process orders, validate pricing and update inventory in real time, minimizing costly mistakes – resulting in a more reliable customer experience. 

They will improve responsiveness.  

Customers need quick answers, especially when requesting quotes or checking order status. For example, AI agents can reduce response times by automating RFQ processing, cutting the turnaround time from hours to minutes. They can also handle routine inquiries, freeing up sales and customer service teams to focus on higher-value interactions. 

They are proactive. 

AI agents can anticipate customer needs. With predictive analytics, for example, they can identify stockouts before they happen and suggest alternative products for a customer. This helps customers avoid disruptions and ensures they always have the right products when they need them. 

I’m not suggesting you replace your people with AI agents. They aren’t robots waiting to step in and do your team’s work. Instead, they can help your team do more, faster: 

• Freeing sales reps for higher-value conversations 
• Reducing miscommunication and errors and boosting trust with your team 
• Helping you scale without compromising service in a tight labor market  

Distributors that embrace AI agents will have a clear advantage. Faster order cycles mean happier customers. Fewer mistakes equals fewer returns and fewer disputes.  

This all leads to a better customer experience, which is a win-win for both the customer, your team and the bottom line. 

The post Why AI Agents Will Change the Game in B2B Customer Experience appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

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Naida will head Sonepar USA’s national sales strategy for growth and customer service. 

Naida comes to Sonepar with over 20 years of experience in commercial sales. Most recently, she served as Vice President and General Manager at Fluke Corporation. Before Fluke, Heather optimized sales operations at Johnson Controls. 

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Ciccone currently serves as District Vice President in Graybar’s Richmond district. Since joining the company 32 years ago, he has worked in sales, branch management, district management and corporate leadership roles.  

“We congratulate Andy on his promotion,” said Dennis E. DeSousa, Graybar’s Senior Vice President and General Manager. “Andy’s extensive experience within Graybar and the industry gives him a deep understanding of the priorities that matter most to our customers. As our industry evolves, I am confident that he will build on our longstanding culture of employee ownership and service excellence to reimagine the customer experience for the future.”    

Graybar is a Fortune 500 corporation and one of the largest employee-owned companies in North America, with more than 345 distribution facilities. 

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To do this, they must bridge the gap between traditional business practices and the new standards of online customer interactions.  

Here are three strategic approaches that distributors can take to enhance their ecommerce systems to boost customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. 

Integration of B2B Ecommerce with ERP Software 

For many distributors, integrating B2B ecommerce with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems represents a significant leap forward. This integration is more than just a technical enhancement; it transforms how businesses operate internally and interact with customers. By linking ecommerce platforms directly with ERP software, distributors can streamline their back-end operations while enhancing the customer experience on the front end. 

This improvement is facilitated by several features, including self-service capabilities, where customers can manage their accounts online, process invoices and complete payments without needing to interact directly with sales staff. It also includes real-time data, where businesses can display real-time pricing and inventory updates, which are crucial for making informed purchasing decisions. 

This level of integration allows for a seamless experience from the customer’s initial login to the final purchase, enabling smarter, faster and more efficient decision-making processes. 

Expansion of Online Product Information 

Distributors need rich and accessible product information. They must go beyond basic descriptions and images to provide comprehensive digital catalogs with detailed specifications, high-quality photos, user manuals and even video tutorials. This expanded product information caters to the increasingly autonomous customer who prefers to research independently before making a purchase. A recent B2B Buyer Identification Benchmark indicates the average B2B buyer is through 70% of the customer journey before ever contacting a vendor.  

As digital natives begin to move into decision-making roles, it’s become increasingly important to support these buyers in their research before purchasing. 

A well-documented product listing helps customers make informed decisions without the need for additional support. It also increases sales team efficiency, so sales reps can focus on higher-level tasks and complex sales scenarios, adding greater value.  

This strategy also empowers customers, leading to higher satisfaction and greater trust. For example, Oxygen Service Co., a 100% employee-owned specialty gas and welding supply distributor, connected their ERP to a new ecommerce platform, looking to streamline business processes and improve the customer experience. Not only did they double the orders and revenue coming in without doubling its team, but the company has also unlocked the power of convenience, empowering its customers to research and place orders more easily and efficiently. 

Personalizing Customer Experiences 

Creating personalized online experiences for specific customer segments boosts customer engagement and satisfaction. For instance, a business supplies distributor that caters to school districts and manufacturing facilities must recognize and cater to the differing product preferences and purchasing habits of these segments. A customized ecommerce experience serves up more relevant products and tailored purchasing options based on the needs of each segment. 

Emphasizing Lifecycle Content 

Content strategy should be a pivotal element of a distributor’s ecommerce approach, particularly content that supports each stage of the customer lifecycle. From the initial research phase to post-purchase support, content is crucial in guiding, educating and retaining customers. 

Lifecycle content can take many forms. Pre-purchase information, such as blogs, frequently asked questions and buying guides, can help potential customers make buying decisions. Post-purchase support, including troubleshooting guides, maintenance tips and how-to videos can enhance customer satisfaction and encourage repeat business. 

By optimizing content across these phases, distributors can attract new customers and build a loyal customer base that values the brand’s commitment to providing continued value beyond the initial sale. 

Improving the Customer Experience 

Integrating advanced technologies and strategies in ecommerce is not just about keeping up with trends; it’s about significantly enhancing the interaction between distributors and their customers. By integrating ERP systems, expanding online product information and improving lifecycle content, distributors can better align with customers’ expectations. These strategies ensure that while technology may enhance efficiency, the human touch remains the heart of a business. 

The post Transforming eCommerce Operations: How Distributors Can Boost Customer Experience and Operational Efficiency appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.