It’s why golfers keep score and distance runners time their races. When you work hard and strive for excellence, it’s helpful to have some way to measure how you’re doing—compared to others and compared to your own past performance.
For us here at Standley Systems, we subscribe to a national rating system developed by BEI. They rank office equipment dealers’ performances nationwide. Subscribers submit their records to BEI on a monthly basis and they compile the data—generating rankings and comparisons among the dealers for the various manufacturers in our industry.
Within every BEI report, there is a category called First Call Effectiveness (FCE). In the most recent report, Standleys was once again ranked in the top 10% of dealers nationwide in FCE.
For customers of a company with a high FCE score like ours, it means they are up and running quickly when they have a problem. It also means that the service man does not have to go back to fix issues that weren’t handled properly the first time around.
Now my dad was a service technician all his life. He instilled in all of us an ethic of doing whatever is necessary to take care of customers. He didn’t just preach it. He lived it. (I can recall many occasions in which he was called away in the middle of dinner or during a vacation.)
I know dad would be pleased to see the BEI rankings. But he would also challenge us to keep improving.
That’s a major key to success in any business: Strive to meet your customer’s needs quickly and with excellence, solving their problems and reducing their pain factor. Then find a way to measure how you’re doing at it.