Eighty percent of companies believe they deliver a superior customer experience, while only 8% of their customers agree. Are you delivering the ultimate customer experience when selling mezzanines, work platforms or equipment platforms? Or are you simply offering “customer service” that is most often just a response to issues a customer might raise.

Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer experience and customer service are different, though related.

Customer experience is the sum of all interactions a customer has with a company over the course of the relationship lifecycle. That includes the customer’s feelings, emotions and perceptions of the brand over the course of those interactions. Customer experience is proactive.

Customer service is just one type of interaction that addresses customer needs, questions and concerns, and supports customers in all of the ways necessary to upholding your brand’s promise. Customer service is reactive.

How to Deliver the Ultimate Customer Experience

Delivering a world-class customer experience requires a significant commitment at all levels of your company. That goes beyond just knowing your products and/or services.

Make sure your associates are trained correctly in best practices for proactively engaging customers rather than waiting for customers to come to them. Companies that anticipate customer needs before they happen stand a much greater chance of earning customers for life.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and try to understand how you might help them before they ask for help.

Be a strategic partner, find out what is important to your customer and why. Don’t just listen, but understand their needs.

Be knowledgeable about the application so you can provide the best and most economical solution.

You can provide a better solution if you understand each customer’s needs.

The Steele Solutions Experience

At Steele Solutions, we want all our mezzanine business partners to enjoy the Steele Solutions Experience.

It’s an experience like no other in the industrial mezzanine and steel platform industry. We are the pioneers in exceptional care because we believe in putting the customer first. We take pride in understanding our customers’ needs and applications, allowing us to provide the best, most economical solution.

As one of our business partners notes, it makes it easy for our customers to get superior quality steel structures.

“Steele Solutions makes it easy to do business with them,” says Scott Hennie, president of Elite Supply Chain Solutions in Hudson, Ohio. “Steele Solutions is customer-centric. Understanding the entire scope of the project by asking questions upfront allows them to create a design that fits seamlessly without interference to other structures, doors, windows and equipment. If problems or issues arise, they them fix immediately and address cost after the customer is satisfied.”

We are proud of the Steele Solutions Experience our customers enjoy as they partner with us to provide the “The Height of Excellence” in engineered steel mezzanines, work platforms and equipment support structures.

Watch a YouTube video about the Steele Solutions experience.

Kevin O’Neill is president of Franklin, Wis.-based Steele Solutions, the leading designer and fabricator of engineered steel structures used in material handling, storage and equipment support.