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.

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.

A great customer experience isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a must. Research proves that there’s a correlation between how customers rate their supplier experiences and their likelihood of buying more – and more often. And that translates into increased profitability.  

Jonathan Bein, Ph.D., Co-Founder and Managing Partner, Distribution Strategy Group, led industry experts in a discussion of how better technology gives customers a better experience.  

Panelists included: 

• Graham Smith, Business Development Manager, Esker 
• Kerrie Jordan, Group Vice President Product Management, Epicor 
• Alex Witcpalek, CEO & Founder, Continuum 
• Bryan Hjelm, Vice President of Product, Prokeep 

Missed the webinar? Access it on-demand. 

The Baseline: What is Customer Experience? 

Bein defined customer experience as “the totality of encounters across all distributor touchpoints and all capabilities.”  

It includes a face-to-face interaction at a branch. It could include interaction with a field sales rep. It could include customer service either by phone, email or chat. It could include tech support, delivery and even billing as a touchpoint, not to mention online, whether it’s mobile or more traditional desktop.  

Why Does Customer Experience Matter in Distribution? 

According to Jordan, customer experiences is the lifeblood of an organization. 

“There are multiple touchpoints, multiple areas of the business and different ways in which you interact with your customers who expect a consistent quality experience.” 

Jordan said tracking these customer interactions across channels is challenging for distributors. The data needs to make it to the next interaction with field sales or a customer service (CSR) rep. “That can be a real challenge in the organization to keep that information consistent and accurate. It’s important that we all talk about that flow of data across the organization and how important it is to inform those who are interacting with your customers.” 

Witcpalek said customer experience is a hot topic, but organizations aren’t good at quantifying its value. Establishing a Net Promoter Score (NPS) correlates the customer experience with revenue drivers. “Customer experience can be a little soft fluffy concept sometimes, but when you can start to tie and correlate it to revenues, that’s when you can really start to quantify it,” said Witcpalek. 

Smith added:  

“Being able to track and measure the impact on service, it’s tough to actually tie that potentially to revenue, but know if you have happy customers, that’s going to mean more repeat customers and maybe they’re referring other customers.”  

Does Technology Help or Harm the Customer Relationship? 

Much has been written about technology as a disruptor — but could it harm established customer relationships? “At the core, you’re building relationships with customers,” said Hjelm. “These are longtime relationships. These customers have been doing business with distributors for generally many years. How can the company harness the power of technology to keep and enhance that relationship and not degrade or erode it? That’s the struggle and the balance of using some of the technologies. How do you keep that personal connection?” 

Witcpalek understands the hesitation. “I think there’s a mentality of, ‘Oh, we don’t want to replace this action with technology because there’s a touch point.’ There’s a relational experience that happens in this interaction. We like our customers to call so we can talk to them.”  

The trick, Witcpalek continued, is to, “let the customer operate in the way they want to operate. They’ll let you know when they want to tap you for that experience. You need to be ready when they want you. It’s not on your terms; it’s on their terms. How do you set your business up to be prepared and ready for that?” 

Customer Experience as a Point of Differentiation 

Distributors sell many of the same products. Can they use customer experience as a point of differentiation from competitors? How would that work? 

“You must take a comprehensive view,” Jordan said. “Think about it in terms of the customer. How are they interacting with your organization? What is their journey? Chart that out and then you can start to see those potential pain points or moments of delight that you can accentuate. Maybe that is where your competitive advantage is.” 

Witcpalek said studies show, there’s a disconnect between what customers expect and think is a priority versus what distributors consider a priority. “Step one is getting on the same page, really hearing your customer and understanding what they want — and not just your top five customers or a couple in the middle, but the entire ecosystem of your customer base.”  

What Do Customers Want? 

Bein pointed out that customer experience is not one size fits all. What matters to one customer may be less important to another.  

Price may be less of a customer influencer than we assume it is, Hjelm said. “Response times, getting back to that customer with a great experience and service level agreement (SLA) can vary. That may be more applicable for a smaller job, a residential job, as opposed to a large commercial job where price may be more critical.”

Smith said most companies he works with care most about: 

“Can you get me what I need when I need it? Are you easy to do business with?”  

Examples: Personalization in Customer Interactions 

There are many areas in the customer journey where technology can make an impact. Hjelm’s customers use the Prokeep tool to provide personalized content. The tool also uses AI to help counter reps take better notes. The platform focuses on “the spirit of getting your message to the right person quickly and allowing that response with the proper personalization.” 

Smith said Esker is best at bridging the gap between digital strategy and manual touchpoints, based on customer preferences for how they want to interact and communicate.  

Witcpalek’s company, Continuum, handles reverse logistics. “We look at personalization as situational. You need situational awareness of what you’re dealing with and the context to the problem or transaction.”  

He looks at personalization in terms of how to engage the right people to correct a critical selling event. “If this is a stocking return, and I bought too many, that’s simple. It can be an automated transaction,” he said. “If I have a defective product installed in the last 30 days, there’s an end-user with a bad customer experience. How do we pull in the right parties in the organization to correct that? On top of that, keeping the customer up to date every step of the way without having a human in the loop.”  

Technology can streamline and personalize some of these experiences while providing the visibility necessary to manage them appropriately. 

Jordan said Epicor strongly focuses on the data behind customer interaction. “The ERP is a great backbone; it’s a great location to store that data, but you need the tools to ensure you’re governing it correctly.” The data must be accurate, updated and secure. “That’s a key part of managing personalization across the customer experience.”  

Expectations from B2C to B2B 

Jordan reminded the panel: “We are all customers, and we carry our expectations to our professional lives. When I log onto the applications that I use, I fully expect it to be curating the data and information for me. That’s the expectation that our distribution customers have every day.” 

Smith agreed. 

“What we saw during COVID is everybody’s going on Amazon and Walmart.com, and all of a sudden, that became kind of native to us.” That B2C experience carries over to the B2B distribution space, and it’s a significant driver of customer expectations. 

“Your customer doesn’t care if it’s a human or a machine entering that order,” Witcpalek said. “They don’t care if a human or machine enters that return. If they’re getting it faster, more accurately, that’s what they want. And then you can add a human on top of that. Now we’re talking about a great customer experience. What roles do I want technology doing, and where’s the middle ground where technology should assist humans?” 

Want to hear more? Access this conversation on-demand. 

The post How Technology Elevates Customer Experience appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.

Customer experience has emerged as a critical differentiator for distributors, with the power to significantly affect a company’s growth and profitability.  

Jonathan Bein Ph.D., Managing Partner of Distribution Strategy Group, hosted a recent panel discussion on customer experience. The discussion included contributions from: 

• Corey Hiegel, Director of Customer Service, Palmer-Donavin  
• Jennifer Jubin, Vice President of Customer Experience, COE Distributing 
• Joann Stitzer, Vice President of Customer and Associate Engagement, Benco Dental 
• Jennifer Johnson, Vice President of Operations and Customer Experience, Motion & Control Enterprises (MCE) 

Is Customer Experience Too Important to Leave to One Department? 

Distributors understand customer experience is about more than the product. A distributor’s differentiator lies in their customer service, how they engage with customers, their value-added services and the application expertise they provide. 

Customers expect timely delivery, personalized experiences, efficient problem-solving and proactive engagement.

By harnessing the power of data, distributors can uncover actionable insights that drive product improvements, optimize inventory management and identify cross-selling or upselling opportunities. This data can enhance customer satisfaction and streamline operations, ultimately contributing to higher profitability.

It’s a complex set of tasks to master in an omnichannel world. “We’ve created a technical support team and a large customer service team devoted to CX that walks side-by-side with outside sales reps to give everyone the support they need,” Johnson said. 

Their primary goal, however, was to standardize across the business. This was more challenging because MCE has acquired several companies. Standardization created repeatable support processes that enabled the measurement of customer experience across these businesses within the enterprise.  

Palmer-Donavin centered their CX mandate at their department head level. “We work with each department on how they impact the customer,” Hiegel said. 

Stitzer agreed that cross-departmental collaboration is critical to these initiatives. “We’re definitely looking at it with the lens of a partnership across functions, not just in its own silos. We have 26 customer advocates across the United States as well to support that lens.” 

Employee Experience and Customer Experience — Both Are Important 

Jubin’s team focuses on their external customers and their experience with her company, as well as internal customers.  

“I think it’s important for all employees, regardless of the department and their role, to have a good experience. Measuring how we treat each other — are you treating internal customers just as you would your external customers? If you’re always acting like that, it will naturally become an extension of how you treat external customers. If you start tracking employee engagement and customer satisfaction, they should run parallel.” 

Supporting a positive employee experience is linked to positive customer experience. 

There’s research that backs this approach. EX and CX together become an unbeatable methodology for growing a company. 

Challenges in Customer Experience  

Exceptional customer experience doesn’t just happen by chance; it requires a concerted effort to align processes, technology and people.  

Getting that alignment is sometimes tricky. “You have so many moving parts in any organization. I might have this grand idea, but roadblocks can prevent implementation,” Hiegel said. “We need to make sure we’re doing a good job of getting all departments involved.” 

Johnson agreed. “When we think about how we carry employees through the customer journey, we’ve uncovered the dire need to document all processes. Whether it’s the execution of something the CX organization does or sales, this documentation seems to help bring together cross-functional teams. It’s a partnership from everyone across the business.”  

But she points out the reality of CX; it’s a journey for everyone involved. “Good CX initiatives start with a foundation of understanding how everybody is integrated.”  

Tracking the Customer Experience 

Measuring CX requires quantitative and qualitative methods, and a commitment to continuous improvement. The panelists described their efforts for tracking the touchpoints in each customer journey. 

They focused on three metrics: 

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. 
2. Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) provide an individual accounting of satisfaction within a specific customer encounter. 
3. Operational Data could include response and resolution times, repeat business, order accuracy, product availability and more. 

Jubin pointed out the volume of data companies capture can create its own roadblocks. “It can be a lot. I think that’s why new positions are being created focusing on CX. We look at NPS and CSAT regularly. But as far as operational data goes, we know from surveys that having stock on hand so customers can receive shipments quickly is important. So, we monitor how quickly we ship as a CX benchmark.  

“Return rates are another big one for us, specifically why was the item returned? We dig into that. It leads to ultimately higher customer satisfaction and higher sales. We have numbers, but the question is: How do we tell a story from those numbers?”  

Stitzer says Benco Dental’s primary measurement is NPS, but they also look at customer satisfaction across the buying journey. “We’re looking for performance gaps against NPS scores, taking some operational data and blending it into one dashboard to help tell a story.” Her team pays attention to return rates, customer retention, contact ratios, first-call resolution and more.  

“There’s a lot of key variables that drive your overall customer satisfaction. My dashboards change almost quarterly with our customers. Just when you’re comfortable, your numbers will change. You have to stay agile.” 

Hiegel agreed, adding, “The biggest thing is taking any survey you do and acting on it. A survey gives you an idea, but that measurement requires action.” 

NPS vs CSAT: Which is Better? 

Jubin views CSAT as more reliable. “It’s just been more predictable when linked with other outcomes. But sometimes you know it’s not going to be reliable. For example, during the height of our supply chain issues, people were unhappy because nobody had any stock. We’ve seen both scores consistently rise since then, but I find the devil is in the details. Finding those open-ended responses and combing through them is quite enlightening. If there are consistent responses, you’re on to something there.” 

Stitzer said NPS is a great relationship measurement at the top level. “CSAT is great when you’ve gone through your customer journey, mapped key touchpoints and understand your personas. CSAT gives customer satisfaction for a specific touchpoint and in-the-moment snapshot of a specific transaction. The question is: Do you want to know about the transaction, a specific moment in time or do you want to know about the journey? Then understand where they meet and marry at the end because they will tell a story.” 

Does Customer Size Change Customer Care? 

An audience member asked an important question: Does the size of the customer dictate their experience and the care they receive? It’s an essential question for resource-strapped organizations that, by necessity, must focus on enterprise-level customers and primary revenue drivers.  

Hiegel tries to have his team focus on consistent CX across the board. “We’re not treating any customer differently according to how big they are. You want to and will take care of all customers, but you must have a strategy for how you size and service customers in emergencies. What makes a big customer big? It’s not all sales. We have a lot of customers. One thing we’ve done for smaller accounts is dedicated an inside CSR to still give them the service and the touch points.”   

Johnson’s team has three layers. “We thought of ways to make it more complex, but we landed on something fairly simple, with an aligned core team to support our inside CSR to ensure we have a regular cadence to keep that engagement and keep churn scores down.”  

Digital Strategies to Enhance Customer Service 

The panelists are at different levels in their digital strategies to enhance customer care.

“One thing that sticks out is our ecommerce platform,” Hiegel said. “It got a facelift about five years ago. The building materials industry sometimes gets called ‘old school,’ but once our customers use the ecommerce platform, they really gravitate to it.”  

Jubin’s company modernized its ecommerce platform more recently, saying, “We’re pushing to have our customers order online. Every customer is different, and it’s a customized conversation and training on changing their processes.” 

How Do You Show the Value of Customer Experience? 

The panelists agreed that any CX initiative must prove its worth. “Customer retention is the biggest way to show value,” Johnson said. “Our ability to keep customers engaged and buying in the patterns they’ve grown accustomed to shows our worth. The other is expansion. Our ability to cross-sell across all our products faster to generate revenue is key.”  

Jubin agreed. “We’re hyper-focused on sales. We can break it down further to customer retention, but we look at order size, ordering frequency, and whether a customer’s activity changed. That’s how we show value.” 

A highly loyal customer can be worth up to 25X more than other customers. Learn how DSG’s Customer Experience RX can help you better measure and drive greater customer satisfaction. 

The post One Thing Leads to Another: A Better Customer Experience Yields Greater Profits appeared first on Distribution Strategy Group.