Better service through research (revisited)

Mar 1, 2006 12:00 AM, By M. Richard Vinocur

Vinocur’s Perspective

The headline for my December 2005 column was “Better service through research.” I discussed the value of research and noted, “Knowing about your customers and how they view your company can determine future strategies.” (I should have included survey information on your competitors, also.) I asked readers to e-mail their experiences, if they had surveyed their customers or held a focus group.

Since then, I’ve received a number of e-mail messages from printers sharing their experiences. The response was very encouraging. It appears that both large and small printing companies realize the importance of staying in touch with customers to learn more about their businesses and those of their competitors. Two in particular deserve mention, one a small company and one a large firm.

The fast break
The smaller company that responded is Full Court Press in Westbrook, ME, a suburb of Portland. (I love clever names, especially ones with puns. I guessed that Ed Symbol, who wrote the e-mail, and Partner Jerry Sands were basketball fans, and I was right.) The company’s Web site can be found at www.fullcourtpress.biz. By the way, AMERICAN PRINTER ran an article on the company in June 2002.

In 1998, Full Court Press was launched in 2,000 sq. ft. of basement space. The room in which the company originally operated is now a storage closet. After two months, the partners had bought their first small press. One year later, they bought some equipment and the customer list of Alrose Printing in Portland. After the deal, FCP had doubled its gross sales to $250,000. Another acquisition, Allegra Printing in South Portland, netted the firm its biggest client to date and proved the catapult for further growth. Today, the firm makes about $1.2 million in sales.

Symbol wrote, “In six weeks we have sent out one survey every two to three days. The total number of recipients has been 30 to 40. We have used our current database and done some prospecting with clients with whom we would like to be doing business. The response has resulted in 43 new sales leads!

“And, we saved an account,” he continued. “One of our current clients checked a box that stated they would never use us again. I immediately followed up on this and converted them back to our shop.”

When I called Symbol to learn more about his surveying procedures, I learned he uses local Chamber of Commerce lists and has software that prevents him from contacting a previously surveyed company. All of his surveys are done by e-mail and his budget for surveying is a whopping $75 a month.

Symbol also said he’s learned clients are open and honest when they have received a surveys, but cautions that businesses should not survey unless they are prepared to deal with the responses. “You might not like what you hear,” he notes.

Best bathrooms ever
The large company is Sandy Alexander in Clifton, NJ. I spoke with Jonathan Fogel, senior vice president and director of marketing. (To illustrate what a small world this is, his uncle Jordan was my fraternity brother and roommate at Ohio State University.) Fogel told me his firm had just completed a customer satisfaction study done by EKG Research Associates in Flint, MI. EKG’s Competitiveness Improvement Program is designed to provide insights about what the customers want, what they think of the product and service being delivered, and how they perceive their vendors vs. alternative suppliers.

Sandy Alexander will implement what it’s learned from the results in an effort to improve its competitiveness factor throughout 2006, and the company plans to do a follow-up study to determine how well it accomplished that task. As an aside, Johnson Printing Service in Dallas uses the results of an EKG study as a promotional page on its Web Site.

In my discussion with Fogel, he gave me further insight into the research. He said he had attended a seminar on research a while back, and chatted with the primary speaker. The research expert asked if Sandy Alexander had many female buyers. Fogel answered affirmatively. The speaker suggested he ask those women what they thought of the firm’s restroom facilities. On Sandy Alexander’s next customer study, that question was included. Believe it or not, it was one of the two top complaints about the company. (The other was that the telephone system was too cumbersome.) As a result, the women’s facility was rehabbed and, of course, the old telephone system was scrapped and a new, streamlined one was installed.

As I noted in that December 2005 column, you never know what you can learn from surveying customers, and you might not be happy with the information gleaned from your research. But, if you follow through and improve on your weaknesses, your firm and your customers will be better off.