Some customers are notorious for hiding their dissatisfaction and being less than forthcoming about how much business they’re giving your competitors. Just ask any sales rep how their accounts are going; unless they’ve seen a marked sales decline, they’ll tell you that everything is great.

This ignorance is bliss – until your unseen mistakes cause you to lose a customer. This problem is a difficult one to solve; for many distributors, once a product leaves the warehouse, there is zero visibility into how quickly it arrived, whether it arrived with all necessary components or, in fact, whether it even arrived at all.

You may be thinking that your company is different, that all of your shipments arrive on time and with all required components. But our experience helping distributors gain access to customer-side data has shown us that customers’ experiences often differ significantly from distributors’ assumptions. Discovering that customer experiences are worse than you imagined can be a tough pill to swallow, but it’s the first step to making needed improvements.

To leverage this data, distributors must have the necessary tools to analyze and interpret it, such as our Advanced Insights platform. Learn how bringing this “dark data” into the light can lead to more proactive business management in our recent article in Supply House Times: 5 forward-looking distribution metrics.