President Bob Wettermann describes the company’s customer service plan.

BEST Inc. (soldering.net) took home the 2007 Service Excellence Award (circuitsassembly.com/sea) for Rework/Repair. President Bob Wettermann recently discussed how his company tracks customer service.

The feedback we receive [from the Service Excellence Awards] helps us identify any trends in areas that may need improvement and helps us determine areas of strength. We get the surveys and independently review results in our operations area. We have two to three weeks of heads-up time [for review], and then we meet for an hour-and-a-half. We try to find common threads – or different ones – to see if people are paying attention.

Then we work on actionable items: discrepancies, for instance. What was striking this last time was that people found us to be good from quality and responsiveness perspectives, but also found us pricey. We are currently benchmarking pricing and services, which are customized. Repair and rework is very specific and different for each customer, so pricing is difficult to benchmark.

We’re a funky chicken; we are a hired gun in terms of service to fix problems that customers identify. We’re an EMS company, but we are a niche part of EMS activity because we don’t sell equipment.

All quality/customer concerns are documented on a Corrective Action Request Form (CAR). These are investigated with the appropriate parties to determine where a failure occurred, and a preventive measure is decided on. All CARs are reviewed in our monthly operations meeting.

We do many different operations to circuit boards. For example, there are 12 different criteria for solder joints; if there are 144 joints and five to 10,000 boards, when one solder joint is out of whack, is that considered one failure or more? Measurement is difficult.

Any complaint is called an issue – such as quality, if something is shipped wrong, or if there is a miscount. The complaint gets logged into our quality system; then we review it and solve the problem. The quality rating would be ‘zero’ for satisfying the customer perfectly in the above example. These are tracked on a percentage basis. And on a monthly basis, employees are informed.

BEST sends an online survey randomly to customers for review. Customer referrals and returning customers are another way to gauge customer satisfaction. We track new customers and the marketing method by which they came to us (referral, Web and so on).

All new customers get our survey, which includes 20 questions based on service. Existing customers receive the survey randomly on a quarterly basis. It is a linear customer feedback form where a “five” means they’re walking on air, and a “one” means the customer is never coming back. The questions are about quality, price, delivery and correctness of information. The questionnaire is similar to the SEA survey.

BEST holds daily production meetings to review customer needs, and weekly sales meetings are held to review prospective projects. On a monthly basis, we review quality issues and how they were resolved. On an annual basis, the president and customer service personnel set sales goals.

Service issues (quality, on-time delivery, pricing) are identified individually and addressed as they arise. BEST has set specific target goals of 99% for quality and 98% for on-time delivery. These are completely reviewed during our monthly operations meeting. And salaries are hooked into that system. Employees are starting to take ownership; they know and understand the goal and internalize it.

We place an equal value on both new and existing customers. We want to retain the customers we have and grow new business each year.

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