YOU set the tone for customer service
Last week, I stayed at the Rosen Plaza in Orlando. It’s a potential home for the 2010 Marine Dealer Conference & Expo, and we were scouting the site to determine its capability of housing this growing event. We were on a tour with two of the facility’s sales managers when I happened to notice a vacationing middle schooler wearing a t-shirt with the letters “BMOC” proudly touting his claim that he was, indeed, the Big Man On Campus. The happenstance that I noticed this only provided a backdrop for what I had just experienced. Read more >>
The debate over the value and the use of customer satisfaction index surveys rages on, and in the heat of the economic downturn, perhaps even more fuel has been poured on this fire. Some of the best dealers in North America have, for the most part, abandoned the practice; some boat builders have stopped using the measurement in favor of cutting costs; and with all the cost-cutting (particularly on the personnel side), one would expect industry CSI scores to go up in a plume of smoke. 
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of customer-service-related blogs I’ll write to wrap up 2009. Through a series of recent consumer experiences, I feel I’ve learned a number of things worth sharing about satisfying customers. Last week, I shared the incredible experience I had with a Disney employee who went above and beyond to exceed my expectations and ensure my satisfaction. This blog picks up where that one left off… There was stark contrast between how Disney’s “cast member” treated my situation and how the cell phone company and its representatives treated it. Rather than detail the story of what happened at the store and come across as though I’m whining or as though I somehow feel entitled to better treatment, let me just itemize the differences in how the two companies handled this situation. 
It’s the holiday season, and it’s all about the consumer. And as a consumer, I’ve been fortunate (or unfortunate, as it may be) to have had a series of experiences — both incredibly good and horribly wrong — that I believe contain worthwhile lessons on customer service and are therefore worth sharing. So with that as a backdrop, I’m going to focus an entire series of blogs on customer service. Enjoy… 
Three years ago, our team here at Boating Industry had an identity crisis. We had assembled a collection of editors, sales people, a publisher and a production team that sought to revitalize a brand that had, for the most part, lost its way. 
While dealer net profits through July are off 60 percent, the rate of decline appears to be slowing. Through June, net profits, year over year, were off almost 86 percent. 
It’s no secret that consumers are spending less these days and that savings rates are rising. Hidden behind this obvious fact is the lesser-known reality that our industry’s top customers, the 79 million baby boomers who have been buying, trading in and upgrading their boats for years and years, may be saving themselves right out of the boat market. 
Joe Cavarretta has sat through enough budget meetings to know that it can be tough to live up to numbers that were put to paper months prior. In today’s economy, “tough” can be an understatement of magnificent proportions. But Cavarretta has devised a method, along with fellow managers at Riva Motorsports, a seven-brand powersports dealer in Pompano Beach, Fla., that helps him and Riva’s three-location company unearth valuable information that aids the dealership in improving its business. 