Guest Post: 4 Ways to Transform Customer Experience While Growing Rapidly

This week we feature an article by Dan Martin, Chief Executive Officer of Xpress Global Systems, an organization focused on innovation, efficiency, and scalability of shipping and distribution of flooring products. He shares the four key areas that lead to elevated customer experiences while growing rapidly.

In April 2021, I had the honor of becoming the chief executive officer of Xpress Global Systems (XGS), a trucking company that specializes in transporting flooring products across all 50 of the United States. Prior to my arrival at XGS, the company had trained its focus on the flooring space and had kicked off an ambitious growth phase. 

Since I assumed the chief executive role, we have targeted our efforts on continuing to grow our service footprint, but doing so in tandem with delivering excellent customer care. This is often a tough act to balance: rapidly scaling up business while still providing personalized customer service. But we believe it can, and should, be done. To thread this needle, we’ve identified four key areas that, since being addressed, have led to elevated customer experiences: 

Happy Enabled Employees = Happy Customers

Before truly focusing energy on the customer, the XGS team has had to focus on the most important asset of all: its people. Through a variety of surveys and feedback forums, XGS realized that we had some work to do to create an internal culture that drove employee engagement and satisfaction. More than 20 initiatives were instituted, including the creation of communication channels; the establishment of a path for employee recognition; and performance/individual development plans. This may sound rudimentary, however, the impact was almost immediately felt. For example, employee turnover dropped more than 100 percent quarter over quarter and we are continuing that impressive trend. 

Voice of Customer

Next, the company began an evaluation process of the customer experience from their perspective through a variety of initiatives. 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) — Establishing baseline ratings and gathering key customer feedback   
• Mapping out the ‘ease of doing business’ and essentially removing any barriers to service 
• Creating an “Environment of Self Service” — XGS deployed a CRM system as well as an improved and expanded customer portal to capture and improve service levels 

• Based on early feedback loops, the company adopted a new set of “customer rules.”  Every employee pledged by signing a commitment letter promising to own and apply the rules throughout their day. 

Closing the Operational Gap

Ensuring accountability to the metrics that matter most to our customers is something that has been institutionalized across the organization as the company scaled up over the past three years. Leadership did this through the use of key tools such as Tableau dashboards, as well as through their own weekly scorecard that consistently measured on-time deliveries and critical-to-quality measurements.   

Leadership also changed the organizational structure to drive regional accountability and allowed each new Regional Director the ability to focus on a smaller number of locations which prevented their efforts from being spread too thinly.     

XGS is now moving toward what we call a “100% mindset.” This means that rather than targeting industry-wide acceptable thresholds of On Time In Full (OTIF) deliveries in the 90 percent range, XGS is focusing efforts on meeting customer expectations 100 percent of the time. Anything less is a failure, in our eyes, and requires corrective action and root cause analysis follow-up. We are still in the early days of this transformation, but the “Drive to 100” will be embedded in the fabric of each customer-facing metric within the business. 

Spectacular Recovery

While XGS  is building a “100% mindset,” invariably failure will occur, or perhaps, an instance of service will be slightly off expectation. What happens in response to these circumstances is how the company wants to really differentiate itself from our industry peers. Allowing each employee the ability to wow customers is being instituted throughout XGS. While maintaining some semblance of controls, the company allows the customer service team and field leadership the ability to solve the problem, attempting to leave the customer saying “wow!” We believe that moments of tumult contain the opportunity to shine for a customer. The past several monthly XGS employee town halls have recognized and rewarded key employees who have demonstrated the “wow” experience in the face of adversity.  

We have a ways to go in fulfilling our “Drive to 100,” and we know that we’ll have to work hard to remain at that level. However, we believe that the above four efforts will get us to that goal…and keep us there.  

Dan Martin joined Xpress Global Systems, LLC (XGS) as Chief Executive Officer in April 2021. In addition to growing XGS’s service area, Dan remains focused on enhancing company culture through a people-centered approach to business.