Customer service a key for both traditional, e-commerce fab businesses

Attendees have fun during a raffle prize drawing at the most recent Mountains2Metal customer appreciation event.

Customer service is a critical aspect to any business.

Most of the people reading this are probably associated with a fabrication business with some fairly regular customers. They issue a purchase order, you make the parts, and then you send them an invoice. There might be other parts that shake up that scenario, but you know the game.

What if you were making parts as an e-commerce business? How would that change your day-to-day activities, while ensuring that you keep your customers happy?

The fabrication side of our business has a handful of customers that we do repeat work for. Our aftermarket auto parts side, Mountains2Metal, is starting to get some repeat customers. That is solely because we offer more than one product for that person’s vehicle, typically the newer-generation Ford Bronco. If you make good parts and keep people happy, they will likely come back.

One problem with getting a new customer with every order is the potential for a new set of problems. It might be something like a missing bolt or a package damaged during the delivery process. Either way, we will do our best to make it right.

I’ll go ahead and throw this out there: The best and worst part about running an e-commerce business like ours is the people. You will get the nicest people who reach out to you and thank you for your help or quality of parts, and then you will get the complete opposite from someone else. Granted, we are human and do make mistakes, but they are few and far between. Processes are put in place to ensure quality. However, that doesn’t mean we won't pull a part off the shelf that wasn’t packaged correctly by a former employee.

Given some recent experiences with that same scenario, you can never monitor 100% of what an employee is doing on the shop floor. You give them a task and help set them up. You then walk away, and three weeks later you find out they were probably thinking about the latest Minecraft upgrade while forgetting to place all the brackets in the box.

Live and learn. On the job shop fabrication side, you typically talk to one or two contacts during an order while it is processing. Those are usually the same contacts that you consistently interact with for several months, even years, to come. You build a relationship and figure out what you can do better to help them in the long run.

As far as relationships go on the e-commerce side, you have to get out to events or host one to meet your customers. A phone call or email will only get you so far.

What I’ve found while growing Mountains2Metal is that the keyboard warriors don’t typically go to events where they must show their faces. They typically don’t want to interact with other Bronco owners, and they get more joy out of being a “Karen.” This was my opinion for quite a while, but now I state this as a fact. The customers who attend these events are more engaged with the community and are very easy to converse with. I’ve made quite a few great friends as a result of these events.

A young raffle winner celebrates winning a prize at Mountains2Metal’s Broncos ‘N Brews event.

Always being available is another thing that the current e-commerce customer expects nowadays. Social media is a curse and a blessing. To be honest, it was becoming quite overwhelming for me. The worst feeling in the world is having your child try to talk to you while you are engulfed in answering a customer’s question online. I had to learn to let it go. Most customers have to understand that there is a life on the other side of running a business. On the job shop side, customers are usually at their desk when they are trying to reach you. They go home and try to leave the work … at work.

Messing up an order on the e-commerce or the job shop side is never easy. You have to take it on the chin, get better, and continue on. When someone praises your products or service, you need to share it and preach it to the crowd. Those people who go out of their way to say something nice are becoming less common.

One aspect of customer service that is very different between the two types of fabricating businesses is the instruction that needs to be provided to install or use the product. A typical job shop customer typically has a drawing, design, or model of what they want. It’s pretty straightforward as far as what they are going to do with the finished product. On the e-commerce side, you have to go the extra mile and provide detailed instructions.

When I started Mountains2Metal back in 2013, we only had a few products that required instructions. Over the years, I thought I’d seen it all when it came to customer mistakes during install. Some left me scratching my head. But either way, we always treat them with respect and help them solve their problem. Now that we have a bunch of different products for the Bronco, we must have instructions readily available for our products. If it isn’t something they can print out, it has to be a step-by-step video that the customer can watch at his or her own pace. Those videos are fun to make, but they do require quite a bit of time on the back end to make them easy and entertaining to watch.

Either way, someone is going to ask a question. Just when you think you have all your bases covered, you get hit with a curve ball. We try to eliminate repeat questions from our customers. And since we are a small business, we don’t have the resources to spend time on the phone or emailing customers. Instead, we have to take note of the questions, add them to an FAQ page, or make sure that that question is answered with the addition of another bullet point to the online product description.

Any information we get from the customer should be documented or used as a call to action. Trust me, it helps in the long run to take care of it now.

In the end, both businesses benefit from direct communication, quick problem resolution, and the satisfaction of receiving positive feedback from their customers. The customer base might be a little broader from an e-commerce perspective, but if you take care of your customers, you will keep them coming back. I prefer to be down to earth and let them know that we are normal human beings making American-made products.