October, 2007

Wake Up and Smell the Lowes

Big boxes remind us that customer service is what sets our lumber dealerships apart.

By Tom Fife

I guess that over the past several years, a lot of folks have had the same experience that I had last week: I drove by my old starter lumber company outside the small town of my youth. It has changed its name three times since it was founded, yet is still a thriving business.

We had expanded to that spot from our cramped lot in town, and we were the only company on the new road for more than five years. But that original rural location eventually witnessed the inevitable arrival of the building and population explosion, with mass housing replacing the cornfields. Then came the hotels and new shops off the interstate exit, and low and behold, a Wal-Mart super store!

And then last week, I saw a Lowes being built less than a quarter of a mile from my old lumber company.

While this is exactly what I have been seeing and dealing with in my teaching and training for the last 10 years, the experience was still a stark smackdown. Is this the end of an era? Is this a doom and gloom picture or is this just another opportunity to shine?

I believe it is the latter. Let’s look at the upside of smelling the Lowes’s down the road.

Remember when you often wondered how profitable it was to spend many minutes or even hours with the friendly walk-in customer only to sell just a few pennies worth of supplies? (Or even coming away with no sale at all!) I can still hear the complaints from the sales force, who called these customers “counter buzzards.”

Well guess what? As those former customers go down the street and try to gain personal customer service from a big box, they’ll begin to see how wonderful it is to have real customer service from a bone-fide lumber dealer.

Now is the time to explain to your gang how their customer service skills and knowledge will separate your operation from the Lowes of the industry. Our strength has been and remains our ability to understand professional builders and to deliver what they need when they need it. Make sure customer service and the customers are a large part of your conversation within the business.

I know at some point you and the company understood that the customer is the business but now it is self evident! When the markets were off the charts with growth, nobody thought to keep up on the importance of customer service. There seemed to be so many customers that we even came to the point of excluding them from our grand plan for success.

Those days are gone for now as our “no-brainer” customers take time off along with the local mortgage brokers. This is the time to refocus on the simple practice that brought and kept your valuable customers in the beginning. It is personal proactive level III service.

Our current market situation is a little like not worrying about fixing the hole in the roof when it’s not raining. But when the drops start, we wish we would have addressed the hole when we weren’t so desperate. When our business was thriving and the customers were plentiful, we didn’t think we needed to give exceptional customer service to acquire or maintain our lifeblood. In our current climate though, it’s easy to point out that there is no more important job in the industry than to provide customers with service that wows them and has them standing with us through good and bad times.

I have had the great opportunity to teach and train more than 7,000 people on how to provide outstanding customer service—everything from the basics to culture-changing missions.

I say now is a great time for the entire gang to wake up and smell the Lowes’s!

If I can help, just holler.