Service Is A Make Or Break

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Whatever you sell, buy, make or install, the customer experience can make or break any business, writes Kestrel Aluminium Systems’ Marketing Manager, Andrew Cross.

If you give your customers a great, stress-free service they’ll buy more, buy again and most importantly, they’ll share their positive experience with their friends and colleagues.

By contrast, give them a poor experience and you risk losing more than just one customer – you could also lose your reputation.

Research by CRM software provider Salesforce shows that 62% of customers will share bad experiences they’ve had with a company with others and of the 1 million tweets about customer service that people read every week, around 80% of them are negative.

 

Delivering service

That’s why it’s never been more important to deliver top-class service to your customers every day. But what does that mean in a practical sense?

Professional services company PricewaterhouseCoopers says that great customer service means speed, convenience, consistency and friendliness, which just proves that it really isn’t all about price.

After all, there’s no benefit to paying slightly less for a budget aluminium section if that section arrives on site damaged, wrongly sized or so late that it delays the project and causes you problems with your customer.

 

Offer a better service

Great customer service sits at the heart of the fenestration industry. It’s how you set yourselves apart from your competition and how you make sure that your customers come back to you again and again.

The key to providing good customer service is to give your customers what they want and that means having a thorough understanding of their business needs and how you can help support them.

Take our customers, for example. The installers and fabricators we work with cover multiple sectors from retail, leisure and residential, to schools, hospitals and care homes, to name a few. These aren’t mass-production installation businesses, they’re talented craftspeople who work on bespoke projects, tailoring their skills to create robust window and door systems for building owners, small builders and contractors who return to them again and again because of the high quality of their work.

But these bespoke projects often have to be completed in very tight timeframes, with the installers working outside of normal working hours to, for example, quickly replace a store front following a break in or to complete a project during school holidays with only limited site access. That means they can’t work with the often 6–10-week lead times quoted by some aluminium system suppliers; they need to work with companies who have stock ready to go when they need it.

 

Stock

To be as flexible as possible, we carry a wide range of window and door sections, curtain walling, roof and framing systems, along with standards, angles, plain box sections and aluminium sheets within stock.

 

Design service

For more challenging projects, fabricators want a supplier who can help them design and build the right solution and to offer them technical advice when they need it, whether that’s when working with curtain walling or thermal framing or when designing unusually sized window and door frames for bespoke buildings.

That’s why at Kestrel we offer our customers design support that will help them create exactly what they need, no matter the size or scale of the project. We make sure our technical teams have the expertise to work closely with our customers for the entire duration of a project and we are always on hand to help answer any questions they may have.

 

Picture: Kestrel Aluminium Systems offers a wide range of core stock with seven-working-day lead times.

www.kestrelaluminium.co.uk

Article written by Andrew Cross
17th July 2023

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