Consumer Products
Lift off
How to create better systems for customer service
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business | July 2009
Page 1 of 2
Phil Graffy, owner, president and CEO, Interstate Lift Trucks Inc.
Phil Graffy has a hard time giving his people a hard time.
Graffy, the owner, president and CEO of Interstate Lift Trucks Inc., is constantly looking for ways to improve customer service, but the fact of the matter is that his roughly 100 employees get it.
The new and used dealer of Toyota forklifts has been honored again and again with Toyota’s prestigious President’s Award, given to its top dealers. With his people polishing that brass, it can be hard to criticize.
“They’ll say, ‘We just won the award as the best and you’re not happy now?’” Graffy says. “I get a lot of that, so I’ll say, ‘OK, we’ll celebrate for the next 24 hours.’”
When that celebrating is over, however, it’s back to focusing on things like money-back guarantees for the rare unhappy customer and creating systems to maximize efficiency for buyers.
Smart Business spoke with Graffy about how you can create simple systems to ensure customer satisfaction and why a good starting point is never saying no.
Say no to no. We’re a can-do company. The reality is I started out in sales, so I’m very customer-driven. As far as I’m concerned, the word no is nonexistent, and it’s up to me to show them a better way through technology and through training.
We’re fairly large now, but we treat every customer like they’re the only customers we have. And just by the fact that we never learn how to say no, it always comes back and we’ll have brainstorming groups and things like that based on customers. And a lot of times we’ll make better practices based on new ways we’ve served the customers.
We have a series of values we tried to create. For everything with the customer, it’s a can-do attitude — that supports the yes theory all the time.
Actually, we get excited about customer challenges. … I had a customer call up one time, it’s Friday and it’s 1 in the afternoon, he just got a contract, and he said he just picked up a new customer and called us up and said he needed 12 forklifts, and we just said, ‘OK.’ They wanted 12 brand-new lift trucks with special attachments, so we went out in the marketplace and, through our rental place and wholesalers, and any way that we could, begged, borrowed and dealed, and we found the attachments. Even though it was a Band-Aid approach, we got the customer up and running and then got the complete order together in the next few weeks. What we learned from that is there’s just nothing we can’t do, so we’ll say yes and work from there.
