As we’ve been meeting with new prospects recently, we’ve noticed some trends that reaffirm our total dedication to our customers. If you assume that only a big company can deliver the right solutions, you may overlook the fact that some big companies seem to forget about their customers. R&D, product development and sales volume creep to the head of the line of priorities, and the result may not be what you expect from a supplier.
At West Ohio Tool, we specialize in special. Some of our tools outlast the multi-year production cycles for which our customers buy them in the first place. We dive deeply into the pool of innovation to find new ways to meet old – and new – challenges. But we never forget the two most important things we do: Listen to our customers and solve their problems.
Lately, it seems that many big companies don’t start with their customers’ needs. Instead, these companies begin with the solutions they have. Some of our customers come to us because they realize that just because a company is big doesn’t mean that it can overcome their production obstacles. Instead, these customers want to find the right partner, the supplier that offers the expertise to develop and engineer highly technical products and solutions, but that moves beyond technology to prioritize customer support.
We have to remind ourselves periodically that we hold ourselves to a standard that some of our customers haven’t encountered lately. We don’t say that out of any kind of arrogance, just the simple fact that we keep hearing over and over again how tooling companies have lost their focus on serving customers instead of simply trying to sell them something. Whether we’re dealing with a branch of the U.S. Armed Forces, an aerospace manufacturer, a company that makes sports equipment or one that’s in the marine industry, we’re always trying to help customers figure out their needs and provide the ideal way to meet them.
From our perspective, anything less isn’t good enough. When one of our customers told us that they never have had tools work right out of the box before they started dealing with us, we were delighted that our product solved their problem – but sad that satisfaction has become a surprise rather than an expectation.
Give customers what you promise them. Always look to do more, better and faster. Never take a customer for granted. And at the same time, innovate on a scale that some people assume is beyond the reach of smaller companies. Those principles underlie everything we do. We think that doing anything less isn’t doing enough.
