engage better with the customer controlling your brand - asq newsletter, dec 2015
TRANSCRIPT
Winter 2016 Volume 23 Issue 1
The Partnership News is the official publication of the ASQ Customer-Supplier Division.
Articles, information, and suggestions should be addressed to: Steve MacDougall [email protected]
Inquiries should be directed to: ASQ 600 North Plankinton Ave. Milwaukee, WI 53203 800-248-1946 (USA and Canada) 414-272-8575 (International) 414-272-1734 (Fax) www.asq.org
ThePartnershipnewsFrom the Chair To the members of the Customer-Supplier Division:
With great privilege, I am passing the “fun” stick off to Jeff Israel. My time as the CSD chair is coming to an end this year but my involvement is climbing to a new level. Working with the CSD Leadership Team and the other members of the TCC has been a time that cannot be forgotten. My passion for this division is strong, and I am planning on continuing for years to come. As I have previously stated, I will be following the Certified Supplier Quality Professional (CSQP) certification until it is released.
With that said, I cannot express enough that the Customer-Supplier Division is growing and we will continue to need your help. With our new strategic planning, we will be breaking into groups and taking a different approach compared to how we did it before. With our revised mission and vision, we as a group will focus our attentions in a different way.
As I stated in my very first letter, communication to the members has really been important to me. Within the last few years, I hope that you have seen the extended communication that the Leadership Team has provided. I believe that moving forward, this will be a habit and you will be informed as much as possible.
What can CSD do for you? As always, feel free to contact me at [email protected] to discuss further.
Cheers,
Shawn Armstrong Customer-Supplier Division Chair
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From the Editor From the Chair-ElectGreetings Fellow Members of the Customer-Supplier Division!
As I write this, it’s hard to believe my term as chair for the mighty CSD is about to begin. It has been my honor and privilege to meet with many of you and to work with such an amazing team of volunteers! I’m especially grateful for the passion, commitment, and leadership of our current chair, Shawn Armstrong and past chair, Pam Carvell.
Of all the member units within ASQ, the Customer-Supplier Division has always stood out from the crowd (in my humble opinion). We remain committed to our values: to be relevant, have high engagement (members and leaders), and have fun! Our vision is: We are the community that creates and disseminates relevant and innovative offerings across industries, cultures, and disciplines to ensure supply chain success.
You might be asking, “How are we going to do that?” Your leader team is energized and focused on our mutual success. As in any healthy customer-
supplier relationship, there is an important concept of shared fate and mutual benefit. Win-win. To that end, our key strategic initiatives for 2016 and beyond have us looking ahead to create and maintain the new Supplier Quality Professional Certification. We’ll also be working to improve the training opportunities we provide and our delivery processes. Last but not least, we’re focusing on increasing our capability in providing the content you need and want by making sure we deliver the right info at the right place at the right time.
Honestly, we have our work cut out for us. The teamwork that will be required is unprecedented in our CSD history. If you are enthusiastic about the future we are creating, we hope you consider joining us as we continue to step into the future. Please feel free to share your passion about fostering supply chain success with me ([email protected]) or Shawn Armstrong ([email protected]). We’d love to have your help on one of our teams!
Best Regards,
Jeff Israel CSD Chair-Elect
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Are You a Customer of Choice to Your Most Important Suppliers?By Greg Anderson
As a manufacturer, do you treat your critical suppliers as partners or simply as product input costs that need to be managed? I’m hoping it’s the former. More importantly, do you know how these suppliers perceive your company? Do they consider you a customer of choice? If not, you’ve got some work to do.
Benefits of Being a Customer of ChoiceAchieving customer of choice status with your most important suppliers creates inherent competitive advantages, including:
• Higher quality materials• Better service and support• Greater access to innovation
and new technology• Faster time to market• Lower total landed costs• More favorable terms
Suppliers will consistently be there for a customer of choice and will generally demonstrate greater flexibility in challenging times. You will come to view them as an extension of your team. They will reliably provide high-quality materials at competitive prices and help you be more successful at launching new, innovative products.
About the Author Greg Anderson is the CEO of Directworks (https://www.directworks.com). He provides guidance for all company operations and works closely with the leadership team to set the strategic direction of Directworks. He brings more than 25 years of experience in enterprise software, strategic sourcing, manufacturing, and supply chain operations to his position.
How to Know if You Are a Customer of ChoiceHere’s an easy test. Put yourself in the supplier’s shoes and answer a few questions:
• Does this customer have regular discussions with my company to clarify their evolving needs and expectations?
• Do this customer’s processes and procedures make it easy for my company to deliver excellence?
• When problems occur, does this customer work with my company to resolve issues in a way that is fair to both parties?
• Is this customer willing to listen to our company’s ideas and new developments that may benefit them?
• Does this customer occasionally go out of their way to help our company be successful?
If you answered “no” to two or more of these questions, you might want to rethink how you interact with your most important suppliers.
How to Become a Customer of ChoiceBeyond representing a significant amount of revenue, you become a customer of choice by fostering a greater level of engagement with your key suppliers. Greater engagement is marked by a higher degree of trust and cooperation and is achieved by incorporating some basic principles into your interactions with suppliers:
• Seek their feedback and listen: Give them an opportunity to be heard.
• Share more information: Help them better understand your business objectives.
• Make it easy: Be clear, simple, and consistent in your communication.
The common theme here is that an ongoing, collaborative dialogue will lead to a more positive customer-supplier relationship. Suppliers will notice the difference and treat you better in return. They will buy into your company’s mission. These principles may sound soft to grizzled purchasing pros, but they are essential to evolving critical supplier relationships beyond arms-length interactions to valued partnerships.
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Engage Better With the Customer Controlling Your BrandBy Neil Barman
Research suggests that 70 percent of customers don’t come back, until and unless you bring them back. Alarmingly, only 15 percent customers believe it pays to be loyal to a brand.
Seasoned retailers understand that use of loyalty programs is not in its infancy. There is always a fixed number of time and dollars that your consumer will invest. The challenge is to make your customer invest that dollar in your brand.
• Between 2006 and 2012, the number of loyalty members in the United States has gone up by 172 percent.
• There were 1.161 billion members in 2012 compared to 0.958 billion in 2010.
• On the flip side, 44 percent were active members in 2012 compared to 46 percent in 2010, and the percentage of active members is slipping every day.
Retailers are trying different methodologies to add sizzle to their loyalty programs and retain customers by increasing benefits and conversing with their customers in multiple platforms.
The customer engagement model is majorly dependent on effective utilization of the four “I’s”:
• Involvement• Interaction• Influence• Intimacy
It is also equally important that this model is well planned, properly designed, well implemented, and effectively managed, to meet the desired expectation. Here are a few key factors that that make this model more robust.
Ideal Time for Engaging Your CustomersThe ideal time to engage with the customer is when they are present at the store. In fact, research shows the chances of in-store up-selling and
cross-selling are up to three times higher—as opposed to at home or at work.
Start engaging with the customer while they are still in the store. Understand customers’ purchase patterns and current basket data analysis to offer relevant and appealing choices. Integrated storefront POS modules capture store-level purchase information. Instantly integrate this information with existing CRM data to make the best offers.
Empower store managers and cashiers to offer instant recommendations and issue the most relevant voucher/reward to customers within three seconds of billing.
Align Your DataCustomer data is the richest resource for any retail brand, and every retailer is likely to have a substantial amount of customer data in their database. But with the size of data sets growing every day, the process of capture-analyze-action is becoming more complex. With the growing complexity, the platform to draw insights and derive returns is becoming more difficult for any structured marketing program.
Customer Engagement Model
Influence Intimacy
Involvement Interaction
Affinity
Evaluation
Dis
cove
ry UseEngagement
continued on page 5
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Staying Nimble
Knowing your Generation Y shoppers, between the ages of 18 and 35, is of the utmost importance. They represent the future generation of shoppers.
A recent study explores the shopping preferences of Gen Y-ers and finds that
this group associates shopping with socializing, places high value on living close to retail, and makes a majority of purchases in-store vs. online. Gen Y-ers use the Internet to research products, compare prices, envision how clothing or accessories might look on them, or respond to flash sales or coupon offers, as well as to purchase items; they are definitely multichannel shoppers. These findings underscore the importance of multichannel communications for retailers. They need to evaluate and understand how the various channels interact and how the profile of their
online Gen Y customer compares to the in-store shopper. A new approach for understanding this involves using retail analytics to understand the market and spatial relationships among today’s increasingly agile customer base.
Using data analytics and location intelligence technologies, retailers can get a better sense of what their brick and mortar Gen Y customer looks like, as well as what their online customer looks like, and determine if they are the same or if there are levels of intricacy that differentiates the two.
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Please Join Us at the
2016 ASQ 3rd Annual Joint Technical Communities Conference
Mid-September, Orange County, CANext year we hope more of you will join us for fantastic learning and great networking at the 3rd Annual Joint Technical Communities Conference, which will be somewhere in Orange County, CA, in mid-September 2016. Once again, speakers are invited to present on quality topics at the 45 minute sessions. If interested in presenting, please contact Chris Riegel at [email protected].
Recap of the 2nd Annual Joint Technical Communities ConferenceIt was great to see a number of you in Orlando last month for the 2nd Annual Joint Technical Communities Conference. And while the keynotes, breakout sessions, and networking were all top-shelf, odds are most of you couldn’t be there in person to learn and grow with us. Now unlike other conferences, you can access the conference presentation material, even if you didn’t actually attend the conference (now that’s what I call the Gift of Quality!). You may access three of the keynote PowerPoint presentations at http://asqtcconference.com/Keynote_Speakers.html and each of the breakout sessions at http://asqtcconference.com/Presentations.html. CSD sponsored four of the breakout sessions, including:
CSD-sponsored sessions included:
Addressing Supplier Issues: The Role of Quality in Engineering SolutionsEllen Lyons, Factory Quality Manager with Raytheon Missile Systems
The Consequences and Countermeasures for Being a Bad CustomerRuss Snyder, Senior Manager, Intel
Enable Innovation: The Golden Rules of Supplier RelationshipsJodi Medley-McMahon, Director of Quality and Business Improvement, Server Products, Inc., and co-author of CSD’s recent book The ASQ Supply Chain Management Primer
The Trust Imperative: How Not to Overlook the Obvious Stephen Hacker, CEO, Transformation Systems International, LLC, and Past Chair, ASQ
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CSD Roadshows Sign Up Now for Your Spring Training!
Our 2016 spring courses lineup is ready to help you hit it out of the park this year!
• Leading off, we’ll be in Southern California (San Diego and Ontario areas) March 29 – April 1. The courses offered will include: Introduction to Supplier Management, Supplier Auditing, and Improving Customer Satisfaction.
• Two weeks later (week of April 11), we’ll be coming down the homestretch in major league Rustbelt locations offering our Supplier Auditing and Handling Supplier Nonconformances courses in Detroit, MI; Toledo, OH; Cleveland, OH; and Pittsburgh, PA.
For more information, or to register now, please visit: asq.org/csdtraining/ or contact ASQ Customer Care at 800-248-1946 or [email protected].
Volunteer OpportunitiesCSD seeks dedicated volunteers to help with deployment of its 2015 roadshow offerings. We’re looking for a team leader to serve as roadshow chair, as well as a roadshow marketing lead.
The roadshow chair serves in a project management role and is a member of the CSD Leadership Team. Key duties include interfacing with ASQ Event Management staff, CSD’s meeting planner, marketing support, and CSD’s course instructors.
The roadshow marketing lead collaborates with ASQ Marketing Services and Creative Services staff to plan and execute mailing creation and fulfillment, as well as implement CSD’s electronic and social media postings.
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2015 Customer-Supplier Division Officers and Committee ChairsChairShawn A. Armstrong Quality Manager Grace Bio-Labs [email protected]
Incoming ChairJeff Israel Satisfaction Strategies [email protected]
Immediate Past ChairPamela L. Carvell Manager, Quality Assessments Pfizer Inc. [email protected]
TreasurerJeff Jaswa [email protected]
SecretaryJim Jasinski JMJ Quality Solutions [email protected]
Education Committee ChairMaria V. Stoletova President Integrated Quality Strategies Corp. [email protected]
Examining Committee ChairRichard A. Gould CSP TheSupplierGuy.com [email protected]
Internet Liaison/VoC Chair and Membership Committee ChairEdward Kendrick Sr. Corporate Quality Assurance Manager Williamette Valley Company [email protected]
Newsletter EditorSteve MacDougall Field Quality Engineer Northern Illinois Honeywell Technology Solutions Inc. [email protected]
Nominating Committee ChairPamela L. Carvell Manager, Quality Assessments Pfizer Inc. [email protected]
Social Responsibility ChairAimee Siegler Global Compliance Manager Bench Electronics [email protected]
Please consider the environment. Do you really need a paper copy of this newsletter? Please send a message to [email protected] with “Electronic Only” in the subject line.