Customer service requirements communicating

Communicate with all buyers and decision makers, including senior management. Make sure the customer knows who you are. Selling products and services requires communication. 

Communicating customer service requirements Customer requirements understood by key managers Requirements understood by customer-facing personnel All requirements understood at contacts points Operating procedures posted at workstations... 

A service is initiated by the definition of a service concept (Heskett et al. 1997) that is communicated to the market and its targeted customers. The required resources are assigned in parallel. 

When an excipient distributor is sourcing a material for a user for the first time or even for subsequent orders on a nonstock item, a key element of information that must be communicated to the user is the availability of the excipient and the time it will take between when an order is placed and when the excipient is actually delivered to the user site. The definition of availability can be variable, especially if the distributor happens to represent international excipient makers, who may have the material in stock overseas, requiring additional lead times of anywhere from two to eight weeks, depending on the service of the supplier and customs, and, now as a result of the Bioterrorism Act, FDA intervention with entry into the United States. 

Today, field-based water treatment services need to provide the customer with an increasing depth and rapidity of authoritative information and support. The service demanded is a high-quality mix of applied chemistry, business management, and hands-on technical skills. In addition, practical advice, fully communicated to the customer, both up and down the line is required. 

A conventional four-wheel drive vehicle with a 5 m trailer is adequate for collecting around 500 birds, while a more custom-planned collection service will be necessary for over 750 birds. Concrete or hardcore roadways may service fixed houses, but the mobile units in winter may only be accessible by farm tractors. These may have to ferry the catching modules to and from the waiting collection lorry parked at a convenient location where a fork lift can transfer the full module from the farm trailer to the lorry and reload an empty module to the farm tractor and trailer. All of this requires good communication and coordination between the farm, the catching units and the processor in order to get the chickens into the processing plant with the minimum of delay and stress to the birds. 

Besides those activities that are initiated by the service provider, systematic analysis of customer complaints yields valuable information about quality problems. Typiceilly, only a very small percentage of dissatisfied customers do complain, while most of them just buy from a competitor without further notice (Heskett et al. 1997). Effective complaint memagement therefore requires that the customer be encouraged to complain and that communication between customer and service provider be facilitated as much as possible. Customers whose compleiints are treated in a satisfying manner often reward the service provider with increased loyalty (Reichheld 1997). Therefore, defective services can be repaired to a certain degree, which is normally described by the concept of service recovery (Heskett 1997)... 

Information gathered, interpreted, and communicated properly can reduce the likelihood of pursuing inaccurate customer expectation priorities. Customer-driven organizations address not only the product and service characteristics that meet basic customer requirements, but also those features and characteristics that differentiate products and services from competing offerings. 

Several definitions have been put forward over the last 40 years but what is known as modern logistics is generally viewed as a business planning framework for the management of material, service, information and capital flows. It includes the increasingly complex information, communication and control systems required in today s business environment. It fits into the supply chain as defined by Mentzer et al. as a set of three or more entities (organizations or individuals) directly involved in the upstream and downstream flows of products, services, finances andjor information from a source to a customer (see Figure 4.1). ... 

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