Supply Chain Management Best Practices, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 10Customer Service: Keeping the Customer Satisfied

Flashpoints

• Customers prefer to deal with companies that can deliver perfect orders and shipments every time.
• The key to any successful relationship, supply chain or otherwise, is mutual trust.
• Accurately identify the top 20% of your best customers because that's where your profits are coming from.
• Insist that every employee in your organization focus on the customer, and then empower them to do so.

Although the religious significance of the winter holidays often goes unacknowledged in corporate boardrooms, everybody who works for consumer goods producers, retailers, or logistics providers is well aware of the financial significance of having products manufactured, shelves stocked, and deliveries made before December 24. Nobody wants to hear from disappointed parents—not to mention very irate senior executives—that they ruined Christmas for thousands or even millions of kids because they couldn't keep their supply chain promises.

So what happens if you're one of the world's biggest retailers, with a reputation built on timely deliveries, and you're not able to fulfill all of those orders in time for Christmas? And what do you do if the reason you're going to be blamed for all the very unmerry Christmases is that you failed at the very thing you're supposed to be better at than anybody else—having full visibility into your supply chain?

That's exactly what happened to online retail giant Amazon in December 2013. ...