Leverkusen | February 23, 2011: Pointing the compass towards the customers

Improving customer orientation and being successful together with the customer – this is the motto under which Chemion has placed two projects simultaneously: via a customer portal the logistics service provider is offering companies the chance to get transparent overviews about services rendered at the click of a mouse and to prepare individual evaluations. In order to anchor the topic of customer orientation even more firmly in the services, 160 Chemion employees have been intensively analyzing their services in a series of training courses and are viewing these from the customer’s perspective. 

„Transparency with contracts, service packages and workflows plays an important role for the customer’s business as well as for that of the service provider“, according to Ralf Thiesen, Head of Marketing and Sales at Chemion Logistik GmbH. „Since in view of an increasing complexity in logistics and the high dynamics on the markets, companies and service providers are equally challenged to make quick decisions and to develop their business further.“ And that is why Chemion set up a customer portal in 2010 making the services and processes they have received transparent for the customers and enabling them obtain current daily evaluations. Irrespective of where and when the companies are, they can log into the portal by entering their password and, for example, issuing new orders in the fields of container logistics and transport. The stocks of containers, their movements on site as well as the status of post-courier-express and package-consignments to Chempark locations can be seen on the basis of container resp. internal dispatch numbers. Ralf Thiesen: „We will be continuously further developing the portal this year and integrating new functionalities until the whole service spectrum of Chemion is covered there in the last stage of expansion.“

Compass: customer orientation with passion
The prerequisite of a good all-round service which satisfies the customer from A to Z is the integrated orientation of services to meet the customer’s requirements. Out of this conviction a good 160 Chemion staff have been dedicating themselves to the topic of service since the middle of 2010 in a customized series of training courses going over several days and bearing the name “Compass - Customer orientation with Passion“. The basis for the training concept, which Chemion developed together with an external institute, was a customer satisfaction analysis. It showed which places in the process chain held optimization potential and gave impulses for the orientation of the further training in terms of content. The Chemion colleagues were divided into ten groups and developed various options on the basis of practical examples in order to design the customer care provided by the logistician in an even more proactive way. In so doing a balanced mix of participants from various fields, locations and hierarchies in the groups ensured that the training courses led to positive networking. The professional point of view of the participants is compared in the training sessions directly from the perspective of the service recipient, which is portrayed by representatives from client companies. This enables solutions to be developed when analyzing services and processes which suit the customers as well as the service provider. The workshop participants consider this factor to be decisive for the success of the training courses, as the feedback Ralf Thiesen receives from his colleagues has shown. „It is this combination of service provider and customer viewpoints in particular from which we draw valuable conclusions for our daily work and are able to adjust our service, which represents a great opportunity for every service provider.“