Market Share

If you had to choose between customer satisfaction and profitability, what would be your choice? I would take customer satisfaction as without satisfied customers the ability to make profit is going to have a short life.

 

How to measure customer satisfaction becomes the challenge. Some people define it as repeat business; others measure the change in sales from one period to another; still others use surveys. What is your choice? How satisfied are your customers? One of my favorite indicators of customer satisfaction is the market capture rate. How much of the parts and service business that is available do you in fact receive on the machines that you sell and service? What is your parts market capture rate? What is your service market capture rate? I will put parts at around 35% – 40% and service in the range of 15% – 25%, which by nearly any measure is not very good. The interesting thing about the parts and service business is that management has been held harmless as there is no precise authoritative measurement by which this is reported. It is an opinion. That means that we don’t have a high standard of market capture rate against which we are measuring the performance of the parts and service departments. That is about to change. With the advent of machine telematics some years ago we can now track the hours of each machine and start to evaluate parts and service consumption rates across machine models and applications. This will be a great advance as we will finally know on which machines we are losing the product support business and on which type of products and services. This will be a tremendous change and opportunity for everyone in the parts and service business. I look forward to his type of challenge, shouldn’t you? The time is now.