Forget branding. Forget your product. The key to success is meeting and exceeding your customers’ expectations. “Operations and fulfillment lies at the heart of your business because it tells the story of what your brand is about,” says customer service expert Joe Calloway, during the opening session at the National Conference on Operations and Fulfillment (NCOF) held at the Opryland Resort in Nashville through Wednesday. “Everything that you do these days in operations & fulfillment flows out to the marketplace to your customer.”
And that’s where the opportunity to stand out is for marketers.
Operations and fulfillment is driving customer expectations these days,” Calloway says, and expectations are being made harder by the fast and easy service provided by such players as Amazon and EBay because they’ve raised the bar for consumers who shop there because their fast service delivers on the promise of satisfying the customer.
Calloway stressed to attendees says the dangers of complacency; i.e. living on their past successes. “What you want to do is to create a separate category in the minds of your customer and be the only company in that category to the point where you transcend commodity,” Calloway says, citing brands such as Harley Davidson, BMW, and Disney as examples of companies that keep evolving. The perfect example, Calloway says, is Disney. “Their motto is making people happy, and customers don’t mind paying more for it, as long as you deliver on the promise.”