Customer Services Goals, Logistics Planning

Customer Services Goals

Customer service is all about establishing a good relationship with your customer. If the representative is knowledgeable and pleasant to work with, it can and will pay big dividends for the business. Here are several things that need to be kept in mind when setting goals and objectives for your customer service:

Be Specific: The goals set should be specific and strictly defined so that success can be easily determined.

Don’t Make Goals Too Easy: The objective should be challenging. In order for your company to grow, you need to continually be challenging to reach higher. In the world of modern business, if you are not going forward, then you can be assured that you are losing ground to your competitors.

Setting Realistic Goals: Goals should be challenging but they shouldn’t be impossible. Set your customer service goals and objectives so that they are achievable with work and effort. Start small and be practical. As your team meets specific benchmarks, the goals can then be revised and raised to a higher level.

Relationship-Focused: All goals in a company’s customer service area should always focus more heavily on the customer relationship rather than on the profit margin. If the degree of customer satisfaction is rated high, then it follows naturally that the profit margin will increase. The opposite of this is, unfortunately, true as well.

Quantifiable Goals: In the same way that goals should be specific is the same way that they should be measurable. If your objectives aren’t quantifiable in some way, then it’s difficult to define the success of your department.

Empower Employees: Customer service representatives should feel as they are supported in reaching their goals. Organizations need to supply their employees the information, resources and the authority to fulfill customer needs in the majority of scenarios.

Logistics Planning

Logistics is the process that creates value by timing and positioning inventory; it is the combination of a firm’s order management, inventory, transportation, warehousing, materials handling, and packaging as integrated throughout a facility network.

Logistics planning serves to link and synchronise the overall supply chain as a continuous process and is essential for effective supply chain connectivity.

Figure 1-1 organises these components, or activities, as to where they are most likely to take place in the supply channel.

Key Activities

Logistics management may be divided into materials management and physical distribution as shown in Figure

Key and support activities are separated because certain activities will generally take place in every logistics channel, whereas others will take place, depending on the circumstances, within a particular firm.

The Strategic Importance of Logistics Planning

The key objective of logistics is to provide customer satisfaction by having the correct product in the correct place at the correct time. Competition worldwide is increasing. Creating customer satisfaction is important to most companies.

The concept of satisfaction has multiple dimensions. These dimensions contribute to a feeling of overall satisfaction and are made up of:

• Cost – what customers receive for what they paid
• Convenience – the effort expended to achieve the purchase
• Confidence in the support services both included and promised

Logistics planning is the ability to satisfy and retain customer.

Consider Amazon.com, which provides books selected from the internet store delivered to your door (within a stated period). The marketing proposition is simple and based on convenience. The same product could be purchased from a bookshop.

If the back-office operation of Amazon either takes six weeks to deliver the book once ordered, or fails to meet a promised delivery date, then the probability is that the customer would be dissatisfied.

The same applies to FedEx with its delivery next day before 10am promise. Speed is becoming an important aspect of service provision.

McDonald’s controls its supplies along the entire length of its supply chain from meat purchasing and paper cups to 28,000 franchise outlets worldwide.

For major companies operating in global markets, the stakes are high. Managing the logistics of supply chain offers the capability to create and reach markets before competitors, and achieve competitive advantage by providing increased customer satisfaction through delivering the right product at the right time at greater value for money because of reduced overall cost.

Logistics is the primary conduit of product and service flow within a supply chain arrangement. Each firm engaged in a supply chain is involved in performing logistics. Such logistical activity may or may not be integrated within that firm and within overall supply chain performance.

Achievement of logistical integration is the focus and desire for organizations to achieve competitive advantage in the market place in which the organisation is competing.