Ever wonder what your client/customer really thinks of your office coffee service (OCS)? What about who it is associated with? Are your OCS route drivers ready to exit stage left or are they loyally providing the best representation of your company’s service? Want to find out?
I have often felt like route drivers are the unsung heroes of the vending industry. It's one of the reasons I rewrote songs with Greg Sidwell in previous blogs to create an amalgamation of the route drivers I have known and rode along with when I was lucky enough to join them. They are the individuals making refreshment transactions happen, much like a waiter or waitress or convenience store cashier. Route drivers are the people who visit customer locations -- the faces the locations likely associate with your company and your brand of service. It's important to know both how the route driver feels about his or her role in service quality and how the client perceives the driver. It was with that idea that we embarked on a journey to ask questions and discover what constitutes the route driver’s system for delivering top-notch service. We got a nice response from our first phase of investigation, the vending companies, but we want more responses and your ideas as we look into the niche segment of OCS.
Calling all OCS route drivers
To better examine the OCS segment, we have crafted a tailored version of our vending route driver survey just for OCS. It is available here: http://bit.ly/2czpZyG. We hope you will encourage your route drivers to take the survey to help the entire industry. We are also offering a cash drawing as additional incentive. For you as the operator, we are drawing five registrations to either the OneShow or the CTW Show, your choice.
For your clients
In addition to the driver survey, we also have a unique version for your OCS client customer here: http://bit.ly/2cZahrZ. It centers around their ideas of service and how they perceive the route driver. It's a great gauge of your OCS service as a whole.
We hope that by the end of January, in just 12 days, we will have enough responses to analyze and put together a presentation of the results. Your ideas will help owners/operators with an effective way to increase quality of service to clients or to validate the great techniques they are already doing. Results will be shared during the NAMA OneShow. Eventually, NAMA plans to also craft specific and beneficial education programs from the results to assist you in training talent in super service quality.
While that is a great and meaningful goal, what is of paramount importance is the status of your service. We may find that there are different perceptions in each segment: OCS and vending. In fact, it's likely. Already the survey has have been full of surprises. For example, we asked a simple question about what the route driver position should be called. We thought we would get typical answers, such as route person, delivery driver, and so on. INSTEAD WE GOT OVER 35 WRITE – INS. My personal favorite was "The Candyman." It's this deep information into the perception of the industry and the people who service clients that is so valuable. I encourage you to take the time to pass the survey link to drivers and clients. Find out where you stand, learn what you could be doing better, feel assured of what you are doing right. It's an opportunity to see how many stars you rate on the service scale. THANK YOU for sharing your ideas in our survey.