A word from Jim Ward, Founder and CEO:
There’s a lot of buzz about customer service these days – as if its value was just uncovered. In fact, Forbes reports that 96% of customers said they’d leave a business if they had a bad customer experience.
For us at Elite EXTRA, it’s not a value proposition or a new best practice, it’s the foundation of how our company was built.
When my partner and I started this business 26 years ago, we agreed that our core value was that if we treated our clients well, we’d all flourish – company, clients and employees. Everything centered around the notion that if we put customers first, all of the other tangible benefits would follow. We believed that fostering positive relationships would help weather storms that could not be predicted. And they have.
Over two decades later, my partner has retired from the company, but our nearly 60 team members are still doing business the same way – with customer experience always at the forefront. A recession, a pandemic, supply chain shortages, and inflation of epic proportions has not stopped our commitment to customer service, and our clients have been loyal through it all.
While we have pivoted from being consultants in geographic information systems (GIS) into a company that develops award-winning software in the logistics industry, we have never stepped away from the core beliefs that we had when we started the company. It applied then and it applies even more today.
Our last mile clients know that if a customer isn’t satisfied with the service that is provided – in terms of timeliness, visibility and ease of use – they’ll look elsewhere. According to a study by Voxmare, 69% of customers said they’d leave a retailer if their expectations for their delivery is not met.
So while great customer service should always be at the forefront of any business’s practice, I would agree that in the present, customers not only expect it, they demand it. And being a client-centric company is more important now than ever.
