Your sales reps are already listening to your contractor customers, but are you listening to what your customer data is telling you? If you rely only on the gut reads of your sales reps, you’ll miss the signs that point to customer dissatisfaction, such as:

1. Changes in purchasing patterns. If your customer has historically purchased from you monthly, then suddenly misses a purchase, they may be shifting some spend to another supplier in response to some known or unknown failure on your part, or in response to a competitor’s perceived superior offering.
2. An increase in returns. Increased returns of specific SKUs may indicate regulatory, code or other industry changes that your company has failed to keep up on, or may indicate problems in product durability or design. Similarly, if a specific customer has begun to make more returns, your sales rep may have an incomplete understanding of that customer’s needs or applications.
3. An increase in expedited delivery requests. When the need for fast shipments increases, it may indicate poor inventory management on the customer side. If you aren’t providing your customers with tools to help them maintain inventory levels more effectively, they may start looking for a distributor who can.

Learn more about the value of these forward-looking metrics – and two others – available on our Advanced Insights platform and addressed in our recent article featured in Industrial Distribution: Distributors, Is “Dark Data” Keeping You Stuck in Reactive Mode?